


Isle of Sand (Who I Am Without You)

by ryyves



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: But not in a canonical way, Canon Divergent, Canonical Character Death, Gen, graphic depictions of death, shifting povs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22636045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: Following a desperate decision, Arthur and Merlin deal with death where it hits closest.“You will kill many more before your time your time as king is through.”Confiding in his mother feels like tumbling from a horse in battle. She is here but she is not his; she is here but she is the excuse, the reason why Merlin is not. She consoles him with a multitude of corpses, the language of the dead. He says, “Not if I can help it.”
Relationships: Merlin & Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. The Red Curtain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [testdrive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/testdrive/gifts).



> Set in a canon-divergent post-s3 universe, years in the future.
> 
> Finished; posting as edited.

Arthur is on the bed, pulling his shoes off and tossing them to the floor for you to pick up. The curtains are red and half-cracked, the window open and the north wind coming through, but he strips before you, pulls on his nightclothes. He doesn’t ask you to undress him, doesn’t instruct you to polish his buttons. You light the candles while he undresses and watch the discarded clothes fall to the floor. Something uneasy lingers like static between you, something in the way he has been looking at you all day, over the knights’ heads in the dining hall, in the field before landing a blow on Gwaine.

Holding the lit candle, you stoop for the clothes.

He says, “I don’t know if you remember this, but a long time ago, you and I saw a vision of my mother.”

You place the clothes on the table and say, “I remember,” but your back is to him and your voice is thin, trapped by your own saliva.

The bedcovers shift as he climbs into bed. “I’ve been thinking.”

You say, slowly, “I remember because I’d lost my father, and I remember thinking I’d never get the chance to see him again, to talk to him.” You laugh. The years have softened the twofold loss, but you keep the dragon he carved for you beside your bed. You turn to face him. “I remember thinking it was colossally stupid. What’s gone is gone.”

You don’t say, _I remember because it scared me. Oh, how it scared me, in my bones, beneath my tongue, inside my ribs like a bruise._ You wait for him to speak, watch him open his mouth and half-close it, watch the glint of his teeth in the candlelight. There is something heavy in his chest, heavy like a heart, and you watch him struggle to translate it into language.

There is a cold that you have felt maybe a dozen times, a cold that goes deeper than your bones to the very soul of you.

“Merlin,” he says. “Light the candles by my bed.”

“What’s gone is gone,” you say to Arthur, as though compelled, approaching the bed. The candle in your hands casts its shifting orange over Arthur’s half-clad form. He sits upright, legs under the covers in the middle of the bed, looking at you. He is so still you feel like you are shattering by comparison. You could reach out, and you still wouldn’t reach him. “And we have to live with it.” You are afraid and you are not quite sure why.

His eyes are strange and you call it the candlelight.

The light grows like a dog’s bark when you touch wick to wick, and you imagine this place in ruin, this place in flames. Call it visions. Call it the beckon of your bed, the late hour, Arthur downing liquor in the dining hall.

“I’m asking you this because I trust you,” he says. “More than anything. More than anyone. As a friend, as… an advisor. When I’m king, I would rather have you by my side than anyone else, than any knight in Camelot.”

This outpour, this declaration from Arthur, who rarely lets you in on his thoughts, even now, until he has finalized his decisions, feels less like a prelude and more like a justification.

“That’s a big promise.”

“You’ve made bigger.”

He looks to the windows, to the empty courtyard outside, through the red curtains. With his head turned away, you can only see the line of his nose, the lift of his chin, his hair gold in the orange light like a fairytale your mother once read you, that will never be true enough to touch.

“I’ve kept them.” It is not strictly true—there are people who have fallen between your fingers, the hundreds of soldiers over the years you’ve watched tumble off their horses, the sorcerers who have died while you pressed the heels of your hands to your eyelids in Gaius’s chambers—but you believe this.

There is something here that he is trying to say.

He says, “Do you know what it’s like to be alone among your family?”

You look at him, his straight back and the tension that never leaves his shoulders, and he looks back. His eyes are dark in the candlelight while the silence stretches. You do not know how he is reading it. You whisper, “No.”

“There was nothing to be done,” he continues. The laugh in his voice is not unkind, but it is not warm, either. “I was the prince. I was set apart. I was meant to be special, I believed it, but it wasn’t in the way I thought. I was just – Merlin, I understand why he did it. My father. Why he thought it was necessary.”

The cold goes through you, and you pull the lit candle closer to your body. Its heat reaches your chin.

“I’m not going to condemn you. But I’m not sure—” You take a breath. If he is struggling for words, you are devoid of them.

“So you understand,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t believe it was necessary.”

“You do what you think is right.”

“Then we’re in agreement.”

“What are you asking of me?” Your voice is wary.

“I’ve been reading,” he says.

“I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

“Shut up, Merlin.” He knows what you are doing, has picked up on your desperation to prolong the revelation, the thing he is going to ask of you. “I’ve been reading about magic, and—”

“Gaius’s books.” A pause, while you look at him, trying to puzzle him out. “Is this about your father?”

He lays back on his heavy pillows, staring up at the wooden canopy. Beneath him, the pillows sink, until you can barely make out his face in the night.

He says, “We’ve tried everything.”

Wax drips onto your cold fingers. “I can do more. I haven’t gone through all of Gaius’s books, or there’s something I missed—”

He shifts and looks at you, the covers tangled around his knees. “That’s not what I’m asking. He’s going to die.”

“Arthur.”

“Let me finish. He’s going to die, and I’ve accepted that.”

“Have you?” It slips out before you can think, because there is a pain in his voice you know as well as your own name. And you know that pain is just as intrinsic to Arthur as it is to you.

“Merlin, you’re out of line. I’m your prince.” The harsh edge to his voice unsettles you, that sudden and unexpected anger you sometimes find yourself facing. The wind rattles through the open window, stirs the heavy curtains, whistles across the courtyard. From your distance, you cannot see gooseflesh on Arthur’s bare arms.

You sink, stiffly, into a bow. You have to be careful, always, not to threaten him, not to embarrass or humiliate.

When you look up, Arthur is picking at the threads of his bedsheets, looking at the mirror across the room. “This isn’t about my father. It’s about my mother.”

The cold sinks through you, carves hollows out of your bones. You step away from the bed. You have to be careful and you are tired. “No.”

“You haven’t heard me out.”

Your fingers close around the hem of your shirt. “I don’t want to.”

But he presses on, eyes bright. “There’s a ritual. My father did it.”

Shaking, you set the candle on the bedside table, and its base clatters against wood.

Years ago, you walked down this same path. Years ago you found the sorceress Nimueh and begged for a trade. You gave yourself a day, at most, to live. There are some lessons that can only be learnt by seeing your mother’s bloated face before you, the man you loved like a father crumpled before stone like a sacrifice. There have not been enough joys since to bandage the ache, the vision of that waterlogged fortress. There have not been enough joys to see it scar, and you don’t know if there will ever be.

You were lucky, once. Few people get to be lucky twice.

“The price.”

He’s nodding. “A life for a life.”

“I won’t. Arthur, there is no way to know whose life will be taken.” Your voice shakes, breaks.

Arthur shakes his head. “I don’t care.” It is less flippant than fervent.

“I thought that, too,” you whisper, and he turns to you, bedsheets shifting harshly. When his eyes land on you, they are darker than you have ever seen them, dark as chasms, dark as a dragon’s heart.

He leans across the bed, props himself on the heels of his hands, legs kicking the covers down. You could touch him, now, like this, but you don’t. He says, “You’ve been there?”

The moment of truth: he will ask you either way. You take a breath. “I know you’re alone, but I can’t do this for you.”

“When? For whom?” The tone of his voice itself is a command.

You are so alone, in here with Arthur, and there is no one to save you, no one to come into his room at this hour and relieve you.

Your voice is softer than the breeze, your knees unsteady. “For you, Arthur. It was for you.”

His brows draw together. He clenches a fist and slams it onto the mattress. The distance between you grows greater with every breath. The room grows larger, darker. You have been in this sea before, alone in a boat left for you by magic, the clouds low in artificial night and the water pushing you, dizzying, forward.

“Damn it, Merlin,” he says.

“When you faced the Questing Beast.”

You call it the dark, the shadows on his face; you can only see his teeth. “That was—”

 _At the beginning of everything,_ you want to say.

He looks at you for so long that your aching legs win over. You press your palm to the nightstand and lean on it. You are frozen: to step closer to Arthur, or to step farther away, would be to choose sides.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I? You didn’t know about me.”

“You’re saying you know how to do it?” There is revelation in his voice, but you think it is calculated, like he has been deciding how to say this since you let it slip.

“I don’t. I didn’t do it.” Make your voice flat, make your eyes hard, don’t leave an opening, a chink in the armor, for him to get in.

“You’re the—look, you’re the strongest sorcerer Camelot knows.”

“Arthur.” Your voice rises into a shout. “If I’d performed the spell to save your life, I’d be dead right now.”

He is shaking. “I don’t want you to give your own life. That’s the last thing I want. I’m asking you to do what I’m telling you to, and I’m asking you as your prince.”

A long, shocked silence. You take a step back, the carpet thick and heavy beneath your feet. You cannot glance away from him, his dark expression you can only take for rage. The hurt quivers through your voice, but your words are clear. “I thought you were better than that.”

He does not part his lips, and he does not shift. He is waiting, you think, for you to change your mind.

“What’s gone is gone,” you say through clenched teeth, and you pull the red curtains closed around Arthur with a force that nearly rips them from the bedframe. The last thing you see of Arthur is betrayal on his face, candlelight on his nose and lips but not reaching his jaw, the furrows of his brow. You have never seen him wear an expression like this before. You have seen him tongue-tied, but never like this.

You do not blow the candles. You say, “I will not do your dirty work,” and turn your back to Arthur. The heavy doors click behind you, your fingers tight on the handles. Your footsteps follow you like hunting dogs, through the palace, down and down.

* * *

The next day you don’t report to Arthur’s chambers. You wake at the usual hour, long before the sun rises, and watch the sun come in through your window from beneath the covers. Your clothes are stiff around your legs, one sock peeled down to your toes and the other gone. With your eyes closed, you feel for it with your feet.

Gaius knocks when you don’t come out for breakfast.

“Don’t you have work to be getting to?” he chides.

“I’m not going back. I don’t ever want to see him again.” With your cheek pressed to the old pillow, your words are distorted.

Gaius says, with weary affection, “You got fired again?”

You wave your hand from the elbow down, the hand dangling off the bed, and it scrapes the floor. “Sure, if you count firing yourself.”

He enters the room. The mattress sinks beneath him, and he rests a hand on your calf through the covers. The silence between you is tense but not hostile. Sunlight lands on his white hair, his wrinkled hand. His eyes are so kind you want to ask him which of you is serving the worse man.

“Merlin, what happened?”

If you could tell anyone what Arthur asked of you, it would be Gaius. You know that telling Gaius would give you all the confirmation you need to hold firm, so why do you hesitate? This is something you have to figure out for yourself, a decision you have to reach within yourself. You know it is not as simple as refusing, verbally, physically; no matter where you go in Camelot, you will still be subject to his authority.

You say, cagily, “He wants to do something, something really dangerous. And stupid. I’ve told him I won’t do it but he won’t listen. He says, well, he ordered me to, as prince of Camelot. So I’m duty bound. But I won’t.”

Gaius inspects your face, the sunlight in your eyes obscuring your vision of him, dissolving him into warmth and white.

“What kind of spell does he want you to perform?”

You press your lips together. It is morning and it is no easier to speak about it. “A life for a life.”

Over the years, you have gathered a small collection of books on magic, all carefully hidden in various spots throughout your room. Some are accessible only by magic, and it is one of those you call on now. You pull it toward you with magic, and you turn the pages listlessly, without stirring from bed. Your body is stiff within the hour from lack of work, so you practice listless spellwork.

You don’t come out for lunch, so Gaius leaves your plate beside the bed. You are trying to think of how to leave Camelot without its knights pursuing you home. If you can cross the border, Arthur will have no command over you. Cowardice is not in your nature, but Camelot is not yours, and even this humble physician’s room has nothing of Ealdor in it.

You hope Arthur listened to you. You hope he has learned.

When you come out for dinner, Arthur is waiting for you. He wears his training underclothes, dark in places with sweat, covered in splotches you remember scrubbing to get out. Sunset turns his hair to a golden chalice, upturned. You feel the door click behind you. Surrounded by precarious stacks of paper, vials and metal racks, pouches of herbs, Arthur looks out of place, his body too grand for the space he is trying to fit himself into.

Across the table from Arthur, Gaius has pulled over a crate and is sitting on it as he serves the prince’s dish. You stand in the doorway and watch, tongue between your teeth.

“Shouldn’t you be having supper with your father?” you ask.

“Actually, I wanted to eat with you.”

Gaius sets the dish at Arthur’s place and begins to serve another. You stare at Gaius. “You’re just letting him?” you say.

“If the prince wants a taste of what you and I eat, who am I to deny him?” Gaius says, but you think bribery, threat, Arthur with eyes like fire in the doorframe. “It will be a valuable lesson, at the very least.”

You take stock of the room: Arthur’s vest on the coatrack, Arthur in a tunic and slacks with nothing in his belt, almost as harmless as the night before. A book lies open on the table beside him, thin but leather-bound, adorned with whimsical illustrations.

Arthur sees you looking. His eyes dip down to your toes, and if he were any closer, you are sure he would be pulling apart your lips to touch your teeth. You run a hand through your bedhead, and he laughs.

“I thought I told you you could live anywhere you wanted in the castle,” he says, voice quizzical.

You breathe out. “You did. I wanted to stay here.”

“Sure you did.” He nods. His voice is soft. “Sure you did.”

Crossing the room, you pull a stool from the worktable and set it before the table. Gaius sets a plate before you. Arthur has taken your ordinary seat.

Gaius stands at the head of the table and you look at him so hard, so pleading, that he takes a seat himself.

You say, “I’ve done what I could for you. I told you not to do this.”

Arthur pushes the serving dish aside and spins the book so it faces you. The two-page spread has been blackened with ink, written with gold and illustrated with an image of a blank coat of arms, upturned and slashed apart. Above, the Cup of Life. The corner of one page is dogeared and torn.

“It says, the sorcerer, he gets to choose,” Arthur tells you.

“Where did you get this book?” You are cold all over.

“You’d be in control the whole time.”

“Where did you get it?”

Arthur runs a hand through his hair, and it sticks upright. “My father had it.”

You slam your spoon against the table, and it clatters against wood. “So that makes it okay? That makes it, what, not as completely stupid and dangerous an idea as it was in the first place?” He is in your space, and it emboldens you.

“No. Merlin, no.”

“You think I’m just okay with choosing someone to die? With _making_ someone die? Do you think I wouldn’t bring back my father if I could? If there was anything right about this?” You choke on your voice.

“In a few days, I will be your king.”

“I quit,” you say. “Throw me out of Camelot. Ruin my family’s name. Kill me first. I don’t care, I won’t do this.”

“Gaius, leave us,” says Arthur, his voice soft, and he gestures with his head. Gaius stands, leaving his plate on the table, and goes to the door, which clicks behind him.

“If you make me ask again, I won’t be asking.”

You school a laugh into a straight face. “You’re not asking now.”

“You know you won’t be the only person I’ll ask. But I don’t want anyone else.”

You chew the inside of your cheek. “Show me the book.”

You set the stool next to Arthur and sit so your arm almost brushes his. You read the instructions, your hand over the illustration. It is not the spell you once heard come out of Nimueh’s mouth, probably written by someone with second- or thirdhand experience. But the author has left a warning: the sorcerer who performs the spell will have the power to choose its consequence. Arthur was right.

“What is it?” says Arthur, and you realize he is leaning close to you, propped on the table, eyes intense. You realize the time has been passing.

“Shush, I’m thinking.”

“Well, quit thinking and say something.”

You run your finger over the words, and your fingertips come away dusted with gold. You do not have much time.

Who could you possibly trade for the dead who should stay dead? For a chance to give Arthur the family you never had?

Take a deep breath to steady yourself. Thumb the corner of the page. “Quit being so infuriating and let me tell you I’ll do it.”

“You will?” All at once, his voice is small. He could expand, become boastful, say, _Took you long enough,_ but when you look at him, his eyes are so bright that you have to look away, to give him the privacy of tears. His hand is almost on yours on top of the black pages; his fingers brush yours.

You have one last chance to turn him back, to stop him at the door of the greatest mistake of both of your lives.

“I’m going to need some time to prepare,” you say, and your eyes prickle. You bend your head closer to the book so he doesn’t see.

He gets his vest from the coatrack, and in the corner of your eye, you can see motion as he tucks it over his arm.

“Arthur,” you say, softly, and he turns. You stand to meet him on his level. “It’ll be me.”

“What?”

“The life. It’ll be mine.” If you are the sorcerer, then this is your call to make, and he knows it. He knows you know he needs you, and he knows that if he doesn’t call off the whole affair, you will offer yourself to the spell so that nobody else dies by your hand.

When he speaks, his shocked voice turns into a snarl. “Merlin. No. Swear on your life you won’t give yourself. Swear on mine.”

You swallow and lift your chin. You know you have to swear quick, or he will recognize your lie. “I swear.”

He looks at you, his eyes quizzical and relieved, and then he nods. “Thank you, Merlin,” he says.

Another moment where it seems like he is trying to sus you out, then he leaves, the door swinging.

Before Gaius comes back into the room, you press the heels of your hands against your eyes until you see stars. Your hands come away wet, but when Gaius speaks to you, you are no longer crying. Wordless, Gaius passes you a clean rag, and you bury your face in it.

“You agreed,” says Gaius, and you can taste the tang of his judgment.

“You don’t know that,” you say.

His hand lands on your shoulder. You look up and your vision is soft and blurry. There is a tension at the corners of his lips. “I do,” he says, and you close your eyes.

In your head, you begin to plan out your goodbyes.

* * *

The two of you stand on the precipice of the dragon’s throne beneath Camelot, you and Arthur. Your torches burn in the tunnel entrance, propped against the wall, and pale shafts of sunset lighten the air. It was never fully black when you came here before. Far below, the ground like a riverbed in a draught; far above, a granite sky. You look up, hoping to pick stars out of glittering rock, and feel your breath swell throughout your body.

If Kilgharrah knew what you were doing here, he would strike you down where you stood. But, you think, he would also see it fitting,

Arthur holds the book before you so you can use both your hands. He is wearing gloves; you want to see his skin, want some measure of humanity. The book shakes in his hands, its gold letters jittering like stars before you. Your shadow covers the glitter, and you squint. The cave could collapse on you and you would welcome it.

You are doing this without the Cup of Life, without the power of Nimueh’s well, with nothing but your hands, your heart, your hope. You are, after all, a creature of the Old Religion. If you give everything within you, everything of you, it will be enough. You believe that. You have to believe that.

You say, in a language you can’t translate well enough to rhyme—or perhaps you don’t rhyme because that will make this beautiful, and you want to remember that this is anything but—you say, _I, Merlin, Ygraine, your soul draw back, your body, and unto the space beyond I offer in return a life._

In the quiet of your head, you have rehearsed it, but speaking it aloud feels like your lungs compressing. You gasp and it isn’t enough to fill your body. You are so, so glad that Arthur cannot understand your words.

The spell rushes through the cavern like a breeze and is gone. There is no light, no sound, just the fluttering of cloth and page corners.

“Why didn’t it work?” demands Arthur.

Behind Arthur, the air darkens, takes form. You nod toward it and say, “I think it did.”

He turns, and his breath echoes through the cavern, ragged, snagging in the back of his throat.

First your fingers go cold, black and blue as a bruise. You press them together and feel the blood shift. Arthur doesn’t see. He is at his mother’s shimmering side, reaching for her as she grows more and more substantial. You do not know where the body came from: the stones, perhaps. From the air. From your own body.

Arthur’s mother is beautiful, her sharp jaw a contrast to blonde hair and skin so pale it washes her out, even in the orange dark. The book falls to the ground, skidding, scraping, and Arthur’s voice comes out in a sob.

You put your hands in your pockets, and the fabric scrapes the skin of your palms. You look at Arthur as long as you can, but he does not turn back around. He is golden in the firelight, and your vision blurs. You want one last happy moment. You want to hold this. You want to remember him happy, wherever you go.


	2. Blurry and Full of Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath, Arthur goes forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the graphic depictions of death begin.

“Mom,” Arthur says, and his voice cracks in the most unmanly way.

Ygraine, his _mother,_ reaches for his cheeks, cups his face. Her fingers are soft, her nails gentle on his skin, cold but growing warmer with each second.

“Arthur,” she says, soft as spring. She wears white. Even though it was years ago that he first saw her, he recognizes the gown, adorned with embroidered flowers. His knees tremble.

“You’re real?” he whispers.

“I’m real.”

“You’re here.” He lets go, runs his hands down his face, steps back.

She smiles, a smile all for him, brighter than the torchlight.

With nothing but her in front of him, he says, “Mom, I’ve—I need you. I’ve missed you.”

“The last time I held you, you had just begun to breathe,” she tells him. “Your face – how you’ve grown.” Her fingers reach out to trace his jaw, and he presses his face against her. “But you are more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”

“Have you been watching me?” Arthur asks, and his voice trembles.

“Grow up? Yes, I suppose I have. But there is a fog drawn down between the dead and the living. There was much that I missed. Too much.”

Arthur beams. “It worked. It worked! Merlin! You did it, it worked—” Body tense with the kind of energy he works out with his sword, Arthur spins in place. His movement stutters, feet sidestepping to regain balance, and the blood goes cold in him. He takes a ragged gasp.

The spellbook is upturned on the stone, its thin spine twisted. And another twisted spine: the line of Merlin’s body in the dark, dark hair, dark trousers, dark jacket, bare fingers bruise-dark and swollen. His legs are bent like the knees were the last to give out.

“Merlin?” says Arthur, and it seems to echo through the cavern above, cold and dark and enormous. Big enough to swallow them all.

Arthur’s knees slam against stone beside Merlin. He takes Merlin’s chin and tips it, fear thrumming through him like a horse galloping, and he supports the back of Merlin’s neck with the other hand. His ear barely an inch above Merlin’s lips, Arthur holds his breath, and then he almost hears a gasp in the thud of his own heart.

There is no glory, no applause, just a body on a slab of stone where a dragon once stood. A dragon’s voice once torn this cavern apart. Merlin’s voice, louder and deeper than any dragon’s and more in control of himself, once filled the skies of Camelot, and now he is quieter and emptier than the stone itself.

Arthur swallows so hard it aches, and he has to cough before he speaks. He draws back, hand still cupped behind the base of Merlin’s skull, Merlin’s hair shifting between his fingers like something still alive. Arthur pulls Merlin onto his knees, twisting him so he lies face-up, his chest still. Merlin’s head is heavy and wet beneath Arthur’s fingers, the hair already falling into clumps. He must have slammed his head against the stone on his way down, split it clean open. It is soft and it gives beneath Arthur’s fingers.

“Merlin, look at me,” Arthur says, and Merlin is. His eyes are blue and blank, not moving as Arthur adjusts his head. The weight of it almost overpowers Arthur: Merlin’s lolling spine, Merlin’s hands on the stone.

“Wake up. Come on, Merlin, wake up.” Arthur’s voice is thin and desperate, and the hand holding Merlin’s head shakes it, grips the hair. “I’m ordering you. Talk to me, laugh at me, do something. _Do_ something. Say, _You’re an idiot, Arthur._ Say, _You’re such a clotpole_. _Arthur,”_ whispers Arthur. “What did you do? What did _I_ do?” He takes one of those bloated hands and holds it tight, even though the feeling of blood under the skin like a wine flask churns his stomach.

Arthur has seen his share of deaths, has caused many of them in the ring or in battle, has seen still and bloodied bodies covered with chainmail and cloth carried to the infirmary, to the grave. He has carried some of them himself, his body straining with the weight and the pleasure of being useful. But he has never been this close to it, in the quiet dark, listening to himself breathe in gasps. He was willing to sacrifice anyone for this, anyone but Merlin, and now, he is not sure he would have if he’d known the full price.

A hand touches his shoulder, and Arthur jerks until he can only feel fingertips. “You did this, you hear? This is your fault.” He says it without looking away from Merlin, from those open eyes. His own eyes are heavy, stinging, their hollows damp.

His mother is a ghost, a grave. She is nothing to him. She had no right to rise from the stone and take Merlin from him.

“There is always a price for changing the world, my son, and I’m sorry.”

“Can you not— _philosophize_ at me? Can you just shut up and let me deal with this?” His voice is rough and crass.

“I’m sorry you have to go through this, and I am sorry your father did, too.”

With halting hands, Arthur places his thumb and forefinger above Merlin’s eyelids. If he presses too hard, he is sure he will drive his fingers into the skull. If he presses too lightly, his fingers will slide over the eyes to feel their wet surface. He holds breath, clutches Merlin’s hand tight, and slides the eyelids down. The eyes are still and soft and fragile. Arthur releases his breath and pulls his hand back.

There is a flash of motion; the eyelids slide up, and the eyes are still looking up at him. Even in death, Merlin refuses to listen. It catches in Arthur’s throat and he sniffs to keep it from coming out like a sob. Merlin is trying to say something, still, with eyes that can only see Heaven. That can only see Avalon, perhaps.

What is it Arthur has seen his men do, Gaius, with the staring dead? Place a wet cloth atop their eyes, a stone in battlefield hospitals, a button, a coin. Arthur looks past Merlin’s head to the platform and Merlin looks at him. _You did this to me,_ those eyes say. _You did this, and if you ever dream again without seeing my face, you are heartless, and you never loved me._

Arthur selects two smooth, flat stones, running his fingertips over them to be sure they will not cut. The last thing he needs is blood all down Merlin’s face. The last thing he needs is to hurt Merlin.

“Merlin,” says Arthur, as he pulls down one eyelid and places the stone on it. The eye gives and Arthur shudders away, shaking his hand. He breathes to steady himself and lifts the other stone. “You swore on your life. You swore on mine. All this time, you lied? All this time you were getting ready to leave me?” He is talking softly so his mother can’t pick out all the words, the sharpness of whispered consonants and breath like a breeze through the vowels.

Finally, when he can break concentration, Arthur says, “Mother.” The word sounds like a deep cave he could fall into. “There’s a path down that way. You can get to the tunnel. Meet me outside. I need some time, alone.”

She passes into Arthur’s line of vision as she descends the rough-cut stairs, her shoes simple and white, covered with dirt. She doesn’t deserve white, Arthur thinks; she deserves red, like the dribble from Merlin’s mouth. He can barely hear her diminishing footsteps over his own breath, over the silence that is Merlin’s. Merlin’s cheeks are wet and Arthur does not know why.

She takes one of the torches beside the door—Arthur’s torch, he hopes, and not Merlin’s—and the light inside the cavern diminishes.

Arthur looks down at Merlin, cradling him against his thighs. “What am I supposed to do without you?” he whispers. If his mother could watch him for twenty-two years, then Merlin could be listening. Merlin could still be in this room. Merlin could put a hand on his shoulder and Arthur wouldn’t know. “How am I supposed to be king?”

Arthur pushes up Merlin’s jacket to tear the hem off his shirt, red and worn, and wraps it around his own arm like a favor.

“Merlin, there was so much left for you. You were going to be magnificent.”

* * *

Ygraine meets him at the grate, her torch snugly set into its sconce, its orange light on her washed-out forehead. Merlin’s weight in Arthur’s arms feels heavier than anything he has ever had to carry, the body a ragdoll with a lolling arm. Arthur let it fall so he wouldn’t have to see the bruised hands, firelight on Merlin’s collarbones, the pallor of his cheeks. Halfway up the staircase, the stones fell off Merlin’s eyelids, clattering against every step as they fell, and now, before his mother, Arthur does not know which grave to look at.

“You care about him a lot,” says Ygraine.

“He’s the best servant I ever had.” Arthur doesn’t correct his tense. He hands his torch to his mother and she sets it against the wall, as though distracted.

He makes himself speak. “I’ve thought long and hard about this. I know it’s not going to be easy, acclimating to Camelot.” The unsaid: It will be obvious, what I’ve done. But Arthur looks at Merlin when he says, “Father’s not doing well.”

“I know. The dead know many things.” She will not, it seems, let Arthur forget the chasm of the grave, the chalice of it, between them.

“Then I presume you know where his chambers are. I’ll meet you. There’s something – well, I can’t just leave him.”

She puts a hand on his arm and there is nothing he can do because he is holding Merlin. He watches her go and wonders how many he will lose to the grave today. The train of her dress vanishes around the corner. Arthur readjusts his grip on Merlin, lifts his chin, and follows.

* * *

King Uther lies in the center of his bed, waist twisted so his feet dangle off the side. The covers bunch around his stomach, revealing Uther in his nightclothes, his skin clammy and yellowed. He is propped on three thick pillows, his mouth open as he breathes but his chest barely rising, his eyes half-closed. His eye sockets are deep enough Arthur thinks he could see through to the brain. One hand grips the covers; the other, Ygraine’s.

She sits on the mattress beside him and strokes the back of his hand. Arthur looks at the back of his own. The phlegm in his father’s breathing unsettles him, the body a ragdoll or a straw training dummy. It comes and goes, this thickness of breath, but Gaius says it will be the dying’s last hurrah.

Gaius said to give Uther light, so the curtains are tied open around the window, around the bed. The candles sit in thick pools of wax. The morning sun glances off the windows that line the courtyard, falls in serrated lines across the room. Arthur stands at the foot of the bed, knees resting on the chest there lest his legs give out. He cannot look at his mother, at the dip in the bed where Uther has slid against her. Gaius has her dabbing Uther’s forehead with a damp cloth. On the armrest of the chair rests a goblet of water; Gaius lifts this as he stands.

“Can you drink? Just a small sip.”

Uther stares at him with those blank eyes, so Gaius repeats himself. When Uther nods, Arthur looks away. He does not want to see his father weak, helpless, relying on his physician to lift a glass of water for him.

“Are you in pain?” asks Gaius.

Uther wheezes out, ever imperious, “Whatever you gave me wasn’t strong enough.”

Gaius’s hand lands on Arthur’s shoulder, and Arthur startles. Gaius is still looking at Uther. “I’d send Merlin, but I haven’t seen him all day. I’ll need to go to my chambers.” His grip is firm on Arthur’s shoulder as he passes Arthur, as he leads Arthur to the door.

Outside the room, the great wooden door almost closed, Gaius murmurs, “Merlin never came home.”

Arthur glances back into the chamber and keeps his voice low. “I’d love to chat, but I have a kingdom to run.”

“Tell me now,” says Gaius, and his eyes are hard and bright, his grip firm.

“They’re waiting.”

“Look inside. They’re waiting for their king to get up, because neither you nor him would make the announcement. Do you think the kingdom fares better if they don’t know why their king makes no appearances? If you ask me, I don’t believe that will staunch their grief. So tell me how you’re going to run the kingdom, right now. If you keep thinking you’re not ready to be king, then you won’t be.”

“Who says I think that? You don’t know that.”

Gaius grimaces. “I’ve known you since your birth. If anyone knows, I do.”

Arthur slumps against the doorframe. “Do you think my father knows?”

“After what he did for you?” Gaius says, recognizing, without a pause, the question Arthur is asking. “Almost certainly. What isn’t clear is whether or not he thinks he’s hallucinating.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes.” Gaius’s voice is gruff. “It is common among the dying to see those who will usher them into the next world. Those they survived.”

“My mother. Gaius, please.” Arthur’s eyes sting, and he blinks hard.

Gaius scowls. He says, “I don’t have the luxury to hold grudges, and besides, I’m too old for it.”

“I didn’t mean for anything like this to happen.”

“You played with death, Arthur. The spell was explicit. I am not surprised. What I am surprised about is that you were not prepared for its consequences.”

A hot thing prickles in Arthur’s chest, burns when he breathes. The sword-itch rises in him, and he is glad he is unarmed. He scowls. The corridor around him presses in, yet he looks down it to the end of the world. “I _was_ prepared,” says Arthur. “For anything else. Almost anything.”

“Then you are not ready to be king, if you would give up the life of someone you don’t know to turn nature on its head. I thought you were better than that. Merlin did, too, I know it.”

Arthur clenches his teeth until they ache, his hands in fists behind him. The burn of shame pushes through him, the fury with it.

Gaius turns to leave.

“Merlin,” Arthur says, his voice rough and hot. “I put him on his bed. His body. You can’t go down there.”

Gaius’s voice is so weary, so heavy with the kind of love Arthur has never known, it sends shivers down Arthur’s body. “So at least you have left me the luxury of saying goodbye.”

He starts down the corridor, and Arthur watches his robes swish around his legs. His footsteps ring like a war drum.

Arthur catches up and stumbles into stride. Gaius looks at him and says nothing, his lips pressed tightly together, his feet falling. And the echo: Merlin’s feet, a pace behind Arthur’s, falling on every step down the dragon’s staircase.

* * *

Gaius opens the door to the physician’s chamber with trembling hands. He holds the handle for too long, looking at his fingers. Arthur stands a few paces back, the sword-itch hot under his chin, his blood burning through him. Here, in the deadest end of the castle, in the place Arthur could always count on finding Merlin, is the last place he will ever find Merlin.

The long table down the center of the room is cluttered with books, a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, vials filled with fluids lying on their sides. There are more dishes on the shelves than one person alone could use, more herbs of various kinds than the city would need in a month. The room still bears the evidence of Merlin’s spells: books that Arthur has begun to learn to decipher, ornate and undecipherable artifacts.

Entering this room again, his hands empty, leaves Arthur shivering. He follows slowly. There is a sharp fear in him that Gaius should see Merlin without Arthur to watch over him. Gaius climbs the steps to Merlin’s antechamber. The door is closed, and the old physician stops before it and rests his forehead against the wood. Arthur had shut it carefully, waited for the click, leaned against it just as Gaius does now. Then Gaius pushes the wood and the cold comes in.

Some winter nights, Arthur or Merlin had forgotten to shut the windows and Arthur would wake to stalactites growing inside his chambers. He’d fought the cold and risen in his thin nightclothes. When he beat the wind out to pull the window shut, snow flurried against his face. It is a cold like that, like snow piling beneath the window frame and his desk, leaving a puddle for him to step on with bare feet.

As Gaius stoops and enters the room, Arthur stops in the doorframe. Merlin looks like he could be sleeping, except for the stones on his eyes, his bloated hands, his pallor. Except when Arthur laid him down, he couldn’t bear the thought of touching that body any longer. One of Merlin’s arms hangs off the mattress; Gaius’s body obscures the blood-heavy hand.

As Arthur watches, Gaius sits on the edge of Merlin’s bed. The bed dipped beneath Merlin’s weight, but beneath Gaius, beneath the weight of grief in that room, it seems to sink to the floor. Slowly, Gaius smooths Merlin’s tousled hair, touches his cheek.

The smell of him. From the doorway, Arthur can smell him. Arthur had carried Merlin out of the cavern in the dark, skirting the edge of the courtyard while his feet scraped the castle walls; by the time they had arrived in the physician’s chambers, the sun was a ghost rising on the horizon and Gaius had left to attend to the king.

One hand clutching his forehead, Arthur reaches out to the doorframe for balance. What had he done? All Gaius’s potted plants could turn to rot before him and he would not blame their condemnation.

As he turns to leave, he catches sight of Gaius’s eyes, so heavy they’re barely open, watery and dark, his face slack, despairing. Arthur could fall into those eyes like a child into a frozen lake. Gaius looks straight through Arthur with eyes like that. But Gaius’s fingers are on the torn hem of Merlin’s shirt, pulling those purple hands into his lap. Arthur closes the door behind him, but it doesn’t keep the smell out. Arthur pulls the collar of his shirt up over his nose and turns away.

_You’re a knight, Arthur. Get a hold of yourself. You’ve seen worse. You’ve smelled worse._

Arthur pulls out the bench at the long table and sits there, resting his elbows on the tabletop, his body shaking. It is lonely, here. He has not felt lonely in a long time. He has woken to Merlin’s face, his voice, the sun through the opening curtains and all of Camelot awaiting through the glass. All the things he has murdered: Merlin’s hands fastening his armor, the skip in Merlin’s step, Merlin’s smile like the crescent of the rising sun.

When Gaius leaves the antechamber, the sun is going down. The leaves on all the potted plants have turned orange, and the shadows of the window slats fall long over Arthur’s arms, into his eyes. Arthur hears the antechamber door click shut.

“Gaius,” says Arthur, and his voice is a child’s. He doesn’t look up, just listens for the old man’s footsteps crossing the room. They stop behind Arthur.

Gaius’s fingers touch the scrap tied around Arthur’s arm. Reflectively, Arthur reaches up to grasp it, pressing Gaius’s hand against his arm, fingers tense on the knot. They both breathe raggedly, fighting tears.

There is no way to share this grief. There is no way to open his soul before the man he stole Merlin from, even if he stole from himself as well. There is no way to rectify his crime.

“I could have borne it,” Gaius says, drawing courage, perhaps, from the way their eyes don’t meet, the way he is standing behind Arthur, staring past him out the window, “if it hadn’t been so pointless. If you had told me how afraid you were of becoming king.”

With all his pride, Arthur cannot tell Gaius he is beginning to think the same thing. That he knew in a place more fundamental than his marrow that his bid to not be alone, to not lose the last person he could call family and be left without any, was not worth Merlin’s life. If he had been holding two torches, one lit, then he had put it out and doused the other in lakewater. His father would have him hanged for sorcery, burnt at the stake, beheaded, drowned. No punishment would be punishment enough.

He has not yet had the opportunity to speak with his mother alone. If he could just speak with her, he thinks, it will all have been worth it. He has to believe that.

“I’m not afraid,” says Arthur instead, the rough edges of his voice stronger than the chill in the room. “I know exactly what I have to do. Who but me has been filling in for all the king’s duties? Who but me has been raised for it since birth? I’m not ill-prepared, Gaius.”

With the hand not holding Gaius’s captive over Merlin’s postmortem favor, Arthur reaches out and twirls a basil leaf on the plant before him on the table. The sun casts shadows on its veins, on Arthur’s fingers against its stalks.

“Then why Ygraine? And why now? Camelot will go on just as well with you as king as with your father. Perhaps it will be kinder. Perhaps its king will think more before he acts.” Gaius sighs. “Perhaps Camelot can finally learn to let the past be the past.”

Arthur’s hand tightens around Gaius’s, and he pries the physician’s hand from his arm. “I don’t have to explain myself. I don’t need to be told I was wrong. The proof is here, in this room, and he’s not breathing, and if you don’t think that’s lesson enough, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want him to be a lesson. I want him _here_.”

In the dark, Merlin is saying, as he prepares the spell on the dragon’s perch, _You know me better than to believe I would lay down an innocent life._ Among the dead, Merlin is casting his spells upon Heaven.

“He was a son,” says Gaius, his voice very soft. He lowers himself onto the bench beside Arthur, back slumped. “Everything I did, my whole life, it led to him. You were his destiny, but he was mine.”

“I’m sorry,” says Arthur, and he tips his head until he can see the physician’s shoulder. He cannot say, _He was family to me, too._ He cannot say, _I met him and I felt like I’d known him through a hundred lives._ He says, again, “I’m sorry,” and his voice breaks.

In the fading light, Gaius’s face is wet from eyes to lips. Arthur rises and turns to face Gaius. He pulls his sleeve over his fingers and reaches up with the cloth to blot Gaius’s face. This close, Arthur can feel the slight lurch of Gaius’s head backward, startled, perhaps, by Arthur’s unprecedented behavior. Here he stands, the future king, humbling himself beneath the standing of a servant, wiping away the tears of the man he wronged above all others, except, perhaps, himself. When he steps back, his fingers are damp.

“I won’t bring him back from the dead, too,” says Arthur, and then they are both laughing, hiccupping around their tears, both their faces heavy and wet.

“That’s a bitter comfort.”

“He was the best of all of us.”

“A toast,” Gaius says, and he reaches across the table for the jug of water. “To Merlin.”

* * *

Arthur Pendragon, heir apparent of Camelot and prince regent, is sitting at his father’s bedside. He has relieved all his father’s attendants save Guinevere, who sits silent on the other side of the bed, not looking at either of them. He has sent his mother to the lonely breakfast table. He intends to meet her in the hall later, before she can return all her attentions to the ailing king.

He is saying, “I’m afraid I’ve made your mistake.”

He is saying, “You never taught me what to avoid. You only taught me fear.” His father’s eyes are mostly closed; he doesn’t stir.

“So I was afraid.” Arthur looks up, into Guinevere’s eyes. The movement has caught her gaze. She is in the shadow of Uther’s bedcurtains, and the shadow splits Uther’s face in two. Guinevere, so careful at keeping her face composed, chews on her lip.

“And I think I understand,” Arthur is saying, his hand atop Uther’s. “Why you’ve been afraid all this time. I want you to know. I don’t think you were right, but I understand. When you—when it’s your fault—when you lose someone you don’t know who you are without, and you’re king and have a kingdom, and a father, you want something to blame other than yourself. You want there to be something that you can put right.”

Uther still does not move; his fingers do not twitch in Arthur’s, though his chest rises and the thin whistle of his breath through his gaping mouth show that he is alive; and it lets Arthur say what he needs to say.

“I thought it was evil. All my life, because you made a choice, I thought every evil that came to Camelot was because of magic. But I made him do the most evil thing it could do and it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t magic’s fault, it was me. It was all me. And I have to live with it. And I wish—” Arthur’s voice breaks and his breath comes out in a shudder.

He wishes what? That his father was here to show him the way through it? With a tight fist held over everyone he protects? That the light wasn’t so blinding in here, the dark so absolute?

Arthur bends over until his forehead brushes the covers, the side of Uther’s hand. The skin is hot, the hand skeletal with long nails, and Arthur shifts so his cheek rests against the back of his father’s hand. With his chin brushing the sheets, half the world goes dark.

“I swore to always do what was best for Camelot. Father, I don’t know who I am without him. I don’t know what to do. You taught me to be afraid of who might betray me, but it was me.” He speaks very softly, as though speaking to his father’s hand itself. If his father knew, really, he would disown Arthur, but Gaius says it is a matter of days and Arthur doesn’t know who else to tell this to. “I betrayed me. I thought—I thought you’d want to see her. But I let myself down, and I let you down.”

He closes his eyes. The top of his head rests against Uther’s ribs, so Arthur can feel Uther’s breathing through his whole body. No shift of fabric disrupts the silence. He needs to know, just for a little while longer, that Uther is alive.

“Don’t go,” Arthur whispers. Uther’s hand is wet beneath the corner of Arthur’s eye. “There’s so much I’m not ready for.”

Before him, his future as king spreads dark and rocky, wild as the sea, wild as an escaped horse. As long as he had someone standing behind him, he could brave anything, but he does not feel brave now.

And Guinevere is beside him, her hand resting on his forearm. He did not hear her footsteps.

“You are,” she whispers. “I’ve seen everything you’ve done, everything you are, and I think you know you’re ready, too. His Majesty knows he’s leaving the kingdom in capable hands. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Gwen, I want to blame him,” says Arthur, his voice raw and breaking. “I want to blame magic.” He’s done it before, cast a shadow over Camelot with his fury, with his conviction that all the world’s evils could be trapped in the glen of the druids.

“But you can’t,” she says. “And you never will. Not Merlin. It’s not in you. I know how you loved him.”

“Gwen,” Arthur whispers, voice shaking.

And right there, with Uther beginning to stir in the bed beside them, Arthur brushes his hand across Guinevere’s cheek, tips her head up, and kisses her. Her lips are wet and salt-bitter, and he doesn’t know whether it is from her tears or his.

He kisses her, and for a second, for a minute, they are okay.

* * *

The shores of Avalon lie many miles from the city, and the size of the procession through uncharted forests means that sometimes they have to dismount and lead their horses around glens of saplings and along hillocks that dropped into crevices.

Guinevere comes, in her riding tunic and a black shawl that used to be Morgana’s. Gwaine comes, Elyan, Percival: the knights who had grown into a brotherhood with Merlin. Leon’s wild hair has been combed, uncharacteristically, for the occasion. Hunith has made the journey from Ealdor on horseback; though the village owns very few horses, they spared one so Merlin’s mother could reach her son.

Arthur has seen noblemen buried with fewer tears than this, but he rides in the front so nobody can see his bowed head. Over the clatter of their mounts, Arthur occasionally hears a sob, a sniff, and his breath comes unsteadily.

Nobody speaks, horse hoofs clicking along the dry path. It is too far a journey to carry a litter, to transport Merlin with dignity. The trees are green and the sky is blue and the horse’s body swells and ebbs beneath Arthur’s legs and there is nothing to think about except the man carried limp on Gaius’s horse, dressed well, his hair shifting with each movement.

By the time they arrive on the shores of Avalon, the sun has risen. The horses pant. The knights lead their mounts to the shore to drink, then remove their own chainmail. Overhead, clouds thin as swordmetal cut across a violent sky, and the lake glistens with its oversaturated reflection.

Arthur raises his hand to shield his eyes. He can see the far shore, trees rising to snow-tipped peaks, raptors circling high in the air. It is just a lake, but the water is dark and the mountain is bigger than anything he has ever seen and suddenly a burial by water seems like the loneliest thing he can imagine.

Arthur, his knights, and Guinevere build the crude boat by hand, the tools and materials carried behind their horses’ saddles. The first hammer strike sends birds careening into the air, blacking the sky. It takes all morning, the air heavy with birdcry and construction and heavy grunts, but when they set the boat in the water, it floats.

Arthur walks back to Merlin and crouches. Sunlight falls across half of Merlin’s slanted head, catches on teeth visible through limp, parted lips.

The magic lies dead within Merlin like a sludge, but his eyes stay closed. Arthur tousles Merlin’s hair. The scalp is cold and hard and suddenly Arthur knows that that hair will never grow a centimeter longer. He wants to sit down next to Merlin and put his head on Merlin’s shoulder until his chest starts to rise again. He wants to press his hand against Merlin’s until his eyes close and Merlin’s open.

In a few days, he will be king.

Arthur stood on these very shores with Merlin once, years ago. The fog was low enough that Arthur couldn’t see the far shore, couldn’t see how far these waters stretched or what they had swallowed. The magic of this place raised the hairs on his arms. His fingers tingled with it.

“If you want to know me,” Merlin said, “you have to know this place.”

So Arthur looked hard, as he is looking hard now.

There were so many things Merlin couldn’t tell Arthur, then; so many things he still couldn’t now, so many things to be burnt with him or locked in the mouths of the dead. The list of things Arthur wants to know about Merlin could take an eternity to write out.

He had let himself believe, for a few years, he would have eternity.

Arthur removes his boots and socks and lifts Merlin’s body. Merlin is stiff, and his knees don’t bend around Arthur’s arm. Arthur’s back strains with the effort of positioning Merlin. The heavy blood is cold where Arthur touches Merlin’s back. It doesn’t feel like holding Merlin at all, except that Arthur has to look down to keep from tripping, his eyes skimming over Merlin’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” Arthur whispers. He knows that no one is listening.

He wades into the water, stones jagged beneath his soles, his trousers billowing around his ankles. On the uneven footing, against the water’s resistance, Merlin suddenly feels heavier than he’s ever been, heavier than he was the long journey through the catacombs to the castle. The water is cold, and Arthur’s toes curl around every stone he steps on.

He holds Merlin close to his chest and imagines his heartbeat is Merlin’s.

The boat wobbles when Arthur places Merlin inside it, when Arthur tucks Merlin’s arms into the twigs and leaves that adorn its basin, but it doesn’t topple.

Gwaine hands Arthur a torch from the shore, and the boat is still beside Arthur when he lights it. Holding the torch, Arthur watches the fire race across the kindling and settle on Merlin’s extremities, his hair.

“I love you,” says Arthur. “I wanted you to know, wherever you are. I want you to know.”

When Merlin’s body catches fire, the bright sky overshadows it. The world doesn’t have the decency to stop, to afford this moment its significance. Arthur pushes the stern and the boat drifts into the lake, drifts until Arthur can only see Merlin’s face through the glow, then just his hair.

Smoke drifts thinly, the treeline flickering through it. Arthur bows his head and the water laps at his ankles. All is silent behind him.

They watch Merlin burn on the Lake of Avalon long after Arthur’s legs go numb and the pale morning sun turns into an orange midday. They watch until the boat turns the corner of the lake and vanishes from sight.

* * *

Uther dies with Ygraine’s arm around him and Arthur’s sword lodged between his bedroom floorboards. At two in the morning, he stops breathing, his eyes closed. Something in it shocks the primal out of Ygraine, and the palace wakes to the sound of her screaming. Some of it sounds like his name, and some of it sounds like Arthur’s. Mostly it’s unintelligible.

It wakes Arthur in his wing, wakes the guards who spring down the corridors. Its echoes make the halls labyrinthine.

In his nightclothes with his sword bared, Arthur pushes aside the guards at the door, the guards who gather around Uther’s bed. The body is still hot, the blood barely silent. He must have died with the covers tucked against his chin, but Ygraine’s thrashing has pulled them across the bed, leaving his chest exposed, his arms stiff across his body

Pity the tumor in the groin of the man who turned to magic to conceive his heir. Pity the barren wife disheveled, sobbing, clutching the bedclothes as Arthur and one of his knights try to pry her away. Against her red face, against strands of loose hair clinging to the corners of her mouth, her pale eyes look like wellwater, going down to depths unfathomable.

Pity the grief of the dead, in all their infinite wisdom.

The guards step back like a ripple to let Arthur reach the bed. He doesn’t feel his feet; he doesn’t feel the motion that takes him to his father’s side, nor the stopping.

All he knows is that he takes his father’s hand, here in the death chambers with half the guard of Camelot clamoring outside. He looks at his father’s face, eyes closed, mouth open like a cave, dark and deep, the skin sunken as though into his body, as though it cannot bear the weight of arranging itself over bone. Five minutes ago, he was rattling through that mouth.

“Goodbye, Father,” Arthur says. It feels like talking to empty air. It feels like nothing is there and no one is listening. “You were a good king, and you made Camelot great. There’s so much more I want you to teach me, but I know, I know, I’m ready to take your place.”

He squeezes his father’s hand, but when he feels tendons give, shift, he recoils. Arthur’s wrist leaves a depression on the blankets.

As he leaves, he hears the bed rustling, and armor shifting as guards step aside. Ygraine touches Arthur’s shoulder, her fingers fierce, insistent, as they close in his nightshirt. Her hand travels down his arm to his own hand, and when he turns, she holds their fingers between them.

Her face is red, her eyes almost bloodshot.

“Arthur,” she says, voice thin and rough, a gasp in reverse. She presses their linked hands against his chest, and he is aware of his heartbeat, the breath pushing his chest out.

“I need to go,” he tells her. His voice is stifled, sharp.

“Stay with me,” she says. “Don’t leave me.”

“He’s all yours,” Arthur says, and pulls his hand back. He has to get out of here.

Uther’s room is a battlefield, and he feigns around knights, pushes through bodies until they give. Or perhaps they give at the sight of him. He sees their shapes shift, hears voices and breaths, but he is alone.

He clears the last knight and the corridor opens up white and tall and beautiful before him, its high windows letting in the stars, letting in the candlelight in the courtyard. He told his mother _He’s all yours,_ and he knows now what he meant.

The empty world is wild and big, and he doesn’t know how to know himself inside of it.

He has not turned the corner before he begins to sob.

He whispers thickly, to the space his father used to occupy in this place, to the candlelit night, “Father, I know I’ll do better.”

* * *

Arthur, prince of Camelot and soon-to-be king, is practicing for his coronation when the knock comes at his door. He doesn’t look up, one hand pressed against his brow, breath shuddering against his palm.

“Come in,” says Arthur, and he goes to the window.

The person in the doorway clears their throat, and Arthur looks up to see George standing stiffly, his hands empty. “It’s time, sire,” George says.

He is not the person Arthur expected to lead him to this moment, to the crown and the throne and the light from the high windows falling just for him. Through the doorway, there are bells ringing all across the city. The courtyard is filled up with people waving the symbol of Camelot, and their voices reach him through the window. And George in the middle of it all, stealing a space which belonged to someone else as rightfully as the crown, now, belongs to Arthur.

“Close the curtains,” he tells George in a flat voice, and the light goes out.

By all records, Ygraine is dead, so Arthur will take his father’s place as heir and successor.

Arthur clasps the cape around his neck, its weight both familiar and enormous, the weight of every person in Camelot upon his shoulders. He does not want anyone else to tie it for him, to take the weight, even for a moment, into their own hands.

He has lost too much by doing that.

“How do I look?” Arthur asks stiffly.

“Magnificent, sire.”

“Magnificent, huh? I might put you out of a job just for that.”

He does not mean to be cruel, but the joke that Merlin would meet with humor of his own makes George clench his jaw.

Arthur stalks past George out the door, past sentinels at intervals along the long corridors to the great double doors of the throne room. Arthur stops a foot from the wood and raises his chin. A low chatter reaches him from the other side. Arthur steadies his breathing, hardens his stare until he is sure he will not risk breaking. Opening his eyes, he nods at the guards, and the doors swing open.

The hall is so bright Arthur squints. The light falls across the shoulders of everyone in the room, the crowd so abundant Arthur knows that many were turned away.

The long walk down the center of the throne room, his throne room, every eye on him, feels like how the sorcerers must have felt, climbing the gallows; the way Merlin once walked it in the guise of an old man; the giving away of his life for something that was more a part of him, his destiny, than anything else he knew. There is an abundance of light, a cacophony of sun, and with every step his cape grows heavier. He can hear everyone’s breathing, can count the lives here.

He is looking for something, but instead of finding it, he sees only Gwaine’s dark hair combed, Gaius in perhaps his only robes not stained with chemicals and herbs, Guinevere’s bare shoulders in a dress he’s never seen, purple and gold. There is an empty space next to Gwaine, and suddenly the mingled breaths become cacophonous, the hall claustrophobic.

Arthur kneels on the steps. He can feel the crown above him before it touches his head, the drone of an officiator old enough to have crowned Uther.

Arthur is breathing for the last time as prince. The air feels colder, somehow, clearer, like a revelation. He is speaking his vows, his voice low and reverent, called into a liminal space between prince and king. And the power settles around his head with the gold of the crown. He breathes and feels it enter him, feels the light rush down into his lungs.

“I crown thee,” comes the voice, as though through a rainstorm, “Arthur Pendragon, King of Camelot.”

On legs steadier than he’s ever felt them and shakier at once, Arthur rises, his back to his waiting kingdom. Leading with his shoulders, he turns. Fabric pools at his feet like poured wine. Every face looking up at him feels like a memory, like he has done this before and will do it again, not just stand before them but be made gold.

Someone should be waiting for him in the front row, closer to Arthur than even his knights. Someone should be there to greet him when he throws the cape off in his chambers, to gather his boots and tunic in a pile on the table and say, with a wide, sarcastic grin, “Whatever my _king_ desires.” Someone should be watching with a pride in his eyes so deep and so bright it overwhelms the sun.

Instead the sun through the stained-glass windows goes dark behind a cloud. Instead, Arthur sees his mother opposite the knights, dazzling amidst a crowd of red in a high-necked gold dress. The color is coming back into her, if not into her face.

And the cheer goes up, first in the officiator’s voice and then taken up by the dozens of voices throughout the room: “Long live the king.” It echoes like a drumbeat, echoes from the rafters. Arthur sees his mother’s lips movie, Gwen’s, his knights’, and he turns his gaze upward and lets the sun fall all over him.

* * *

“Not like this,” he tells his mother in the privacy of his chambers. He wears just a tunic and slacks, his belt and sword on the table. George has made the bed, replaced the candles, and set out a light meal which neither of them touch. Arthur sits at the desk with his head in his hands and his mother sits on the high bed, so that Arthur has to look up at her.

“I am so proud of you, my son” she tells him. “I have never been prouder.” Her voice is thick and her eyes wet but more intense than Morgana’s have ever been.

“I don’t know if I’m worth being proud of.” If he doesn’t look at her, he can say these things.

“You have a good heart. You’re becoming a great man.”

“I didn’t want it like this.” There is a cruelty in his blood that is all his, something he did not inherit from his father. He digs his fingers into his hair.

“Never again. Never again will I sacrifice for my own ends, put myself before the kingdom. I know what I did and I’m sorry. I’ll never see him again and I made him do this and he chose, he _chose,_ to sacrifice himself for my stupid whims.” His voice breaks off in a sob. “I was weak and I killed him.”

Ygraine rises from the bed to rest her hands on Arthur’s desk, the wisps of hair dangling from her bun hanging close enough to the candle flame that they could catch. Arthur shifts away, stares at her shoulders, her hands, the papers across the desk, anything but her face.

“You will kill many more before your time your time as king is through.”

Confiding in her feels like tumbling from a horse in battle, disorienting, uneasy, dangerous. She is here but she is not his; she is here but she is the excuse, the reason why Merlin is not. She consoles him with a multitude of corpses, the language of the dead. “Not if I can help it.”

His breath comes uncertainly. There are things he wants to say and he will have ample time to say them.

“Do you regret it?” His voice is cautious. “Coming back?”

She meets his eyes with parted lips painted dark pink against her ghost-pale skin. The desk between them could be a sun-bright ocean, a battlefield littered with corpses, her hands barely a foot from his own.

“When you were born, it was worth everything just to hold you for a few seconds. To have my life taken from me, it was worth it, because you had all of yours ahead of you. I knew the moment I heard you cry that you were destined to be the greatest king Albion had ever seen. I regret that you will lose a mother twice, but I believe you will stay good. I—” She swallows, and Arthur holds his breath, aware that the sound of his breathing could wrench his mother out of reverie. Her voice is so soft he is not sure he hears it. “Yes, I regret that I will have to die again.”

Merlin crumpled on the stone, his blood pooling in places it never should have gathered, his body giving like peach skin, his eyes so white and so dark. Arthur says, “Then it doesn’t get easier.”

“No.”

There is a tremor between his words. “It’s as frightening as we believed it was as children.”

“Yes. Nothing can prepare you for the way the body stops. But I want you to know it didn’t hurt.”

“It didn’t hurt you.” Arthur’s voice breaks, and he presses his fingertips against his eyelids. “Mother, I’m not good. He warned me. And years ago, you warned me. Every day my father was alive was a warning. You don’t get to tell me I’m good.”

“Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Shut up. Just. Keep your hollow words. It wasn’t a mistake, so I don’t want to hear it.” Arthur slams his hands on the desk, and she startles, the white of her ornate dress catching the light so he has to look away. “He fell and I wasn’t looking. He fell and I don’t know if it was the spell or the rock floor that got him.” He is crying fully, now, his whole face damp, his body shaking, his mother blurry and full of light before him. His voice comes out plaintive. “I don’t know which would be worse. I’ve never been where he is and—” He wipes his eyes hard with the heel of his hand.

She shifts as if to circle the desk and hold him. Instead, she reaches for his fingers, for one hand. They twitch under her own, fold under her fingertips until they are both holding onto each other, Arthur’s hand getting his mother’s damp.

He says, “And I should have at least stood witness. He was alone when he died, and I was right there.”

She keeps going. “But I am sick of Pendragons playing God with magic and my life.” Her voice is level, almost kind, and Arthur’s skin crawls.

“I won’t be like Uther. I’ll learn. I’m learning.”

“Then start now.”

He has had enough of hard lessons. He wants something easy, for once, something soft and bright. But then that means he wants Merlin’s smile and there is too much dirt on top of the grave.

“It wasn’t magic,” he says, cold all the way through. “It was me.”

Her voice is cold, too, almost detached. “My son.”

Arthur turns his face away from his mother, eyes red and stinging. “Will you stop saying that?”

Her hand cups his cheek but does not force him to turn to her, and she draws her thumb along the line of his face from eye socket to jaw. “I thought I would never have the chance to say it again. My son. My beautiful boy. The once and future king.”


	3. To Be Happy Anywhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath, Merlin goes forward.

But magic is not always that easy. The sorcerer’s hand means little before the power of the spell, before the mighty dragon-chamber still breathing it, and sometimes, as this time, he does not get his wish.

You were never destined to give your life for the king of Camelot; you were destined to outlive him, whatever king he should become. But if destiny were to be believed, something would have turned you and him away at the grate. Something would have kept him here, if not for you, then for Albion. Something would have given you more time.

Sometimes we have a citadel with golden parapets in the melancholy sky, and sometimes we have a king prone on a stone dais where his father once imprisoned a dragon. It comes back to him, his father’s legacy. His father’s mistakes become his own.

But you are still breathing, your careful pages of notes unfolded above the base spell in the book between Arthur’s palms. His hands shake, the language of magic and its local annotations shuddering enough that you need to squint. Lips between your teeth, you glance up at him, his jaw set and his eyes staring through your brow.

The spell comes out of you like you are choking out the fist-shaped mass of your heart, scraping the back of your throat like vomit. _I, Merlin, Ygraine, your soul draw back, your body, and unto the space beyond I offer in return a life._ You envision it: Arthur holding his mother while your body falls to the stone, Arthur climbing out of Kilgharrah’s prison with his mother’s arm around his elbow, Arthur the once and future king taking his place upon the throne of Camelot, crown gleaming brighter than the sunrise.

After years of working as apprentice physician under Gaius, after years of following Arthur on quests and patrols, you have seen every kind of death you could imagine, and you are ready. The air smells of Kilgharrah, of fire and dust, of twenty desperate years. It is close around you, and every inhale seems to bring it closer, to that narrow tunnel some people envision after life.

Surely Arthur can read you from your breaths alone. You breathe and imagine you are breathing just for him. This is the last time you will ever see him.

The spell rushes through the cavern like a coastal storm, ripping through your thick clothes, tearing at your outstretched hands, and is gone. There is no light, no sound, just the fluttering of cloth and page corners. You can hear each other’s ragged breathing. Arthur is holding your eyes like he knows what you have offered, and knows that once the words are spoken, even he cannot stop it.

Behind Arthur, the air darkens, takes form. He says, “Why didn’t it work?” You don’t know if he is more afraid to see her than he is for the spell to prove insufficient.

“Look behind you,” you say.

Arthur turns and his breath echoes through the cavern, ragged, catching in the back of his throat. One hand releases the book and it swings against his side, its loose pages fluttering out across the platform, disappearing into the darkness of the dragon chamber. No one left alive will need those pages.

“Merlin, you did it,” he says with a glee that cannot be held in his voice alone. You beam at his back, but after a second, it becomes a strain in the corners of your mouth, and you are left staring sourly at the back of his head.

Arthur stumbles toward his mother and she catches him, holds him at elbow-length, her eyes soft but dry. Satisfaction grows like a fever deep in your chest. She wears white, the same color you saw her wearing once before, when she put her hand against the veil but couldn’t cross through. Perhaps it is the color she was buried in. Before Arthur, she is like a halo, pale skin, pale dress, pale hair fluttering around her face. You hold up your hands and imagine tingles running down your arms, the lethargy of slowing bloodflow, imagine it is getting harder to breathe. You are waiting to say goodbye until you are going.

You watch him go down, his golden hair tossed by the force of it. There is not so much as a chill in the air, a cacophony of birds, an outcry. But he gets to see her, gets to hold her. Before he goes, he gets to see.

The book falls with him, the company of loose pages scattering, and you don’t know which is louder hitting the stones. It lands across Arthur’s arm. You are frozen, staring through the place where Arthur just stood before his mother, her pale eyes blank. Then she looks down, but your eyes don’t move.

“Arthur,” you whisper. It is as though you are waiting for him to get up. It only takes a moment before you forget what he looked like standing up. He lies prone, half on his side, and you can see a fraction of his face.

He should be standing. He should be embracing his mother, holding her hands while he talked, smiling in a way you could feel with your whole body just by looking at the back of his head. The smile is still on his face, idiotic and heartbreaking. There is something burning inside you like all your ribs are cracking, one by one, from the top down, and you can’t breathe through it. You bite your lip hard.

You were ready. You had almost swallowed the fear of the body stopping, of watching your body wrest control away from you. Nimueh got to choose, so surely you should have, too. You should have been able to grant Arthur this one request before you went.

The spell has stolen both of you from you. For a heartbeat, you held every life in Camelot in your empty hands; for a heartbeat, Arthur trusted you with them. A heartbeat ago Arthur was here, standing and smiling, quick hands and quicker eyes, and now there is no heartbeat in him at all. You can hear it, the silence in his blood. Soon livor mortis will set in, and the still blood will pool beneath his spine and the backs of his arms. Soon he won’t be Arthur’s body but just a body, decay already set in.

“Arthur,” you say, and your voice breaks. You try again, but only manage the first syllable before you sniff and your eyes skip past stinging to streaming.

“No, no, Arthur, this isn’t right. This isn’t what I wanted. Arthur, come back.” The cavern is enormous and dark and uncaring, and your voice bounces back at you a dozen times. Your voice is barely intelligible, rough and thick, interrupted by sobs. You sink to your knees and have to crawl over to Arthur.

You don’t shift Arthur’s body for fear of hearing it snap, squish, give way beneath your hands, but you take both his hands in your own. “Arthur, please,” you say. “Please, I didn’t mean this.” If he were cold, perhaps you could bear this, but the blood has just stopped and his hands feel fevered, cooling to lukewarm as you hold them. You put them on your thighs as if that will keep the warmth in.

“Arthur, come on. Come on.”

Ygraine sinks to her knees beside Arthur, and you snarl, “Get back.”

She stills but doesn’t recoil, her hands resting on the stone.

You say, “You don’t get to come crawling over to him like it wasn’t you he gave his life for.”

The stone is cold and rough against your knees; you are sure you pulled something from falling so hard. You have to turn him over; you can’t leave him like this. As Gaius’s assistant, you have touched the dead a thousand times before, so you take a deep breath, set your hands against his hip and shoulder, and push. His body rolls back as easily as if he were sleeping, easier, and you recoil.

Bile builds in the back of your throat, and you turn and vomit right beside you. Then flecks of it are on Arthur’s shirt and you are desperate to get them off, scraping frantically with the pads of your thumbs.

He is clean and you are still scraping yourself off his shirt, his skin giving beneath your sore fingers. His body shakes in a way it never did when you shook him awake. You taste sick on your teeth, your breath. You have to stop this, now, or you’ll never stop.

You bend down and press your shoulders, your chest, your head against Arthur’s body. The smell of him is so strong, stronger than the smell of your sick, so strong it makes you dizzy. If he’s right here, how can he not be breathing? You leave his hand on your leg and cup his face, fingers tangling in the ends of hair you helped wash yesterday morning.

You whisper into his chest, “Gaius, Kilgharrah. Anyone. I can’t get him out of here on my own.” It seems to bounce off the stalactites, nothing moving but your lips. You close your eyes but it does no good to pretend that the heat against your ear isn’t still, isn’t fading.

You take a shuddering breath, swallow, take another. The taste of bile burns the back of your throat. You do not address her when you say, softly, eyes blank on the space Arthur’s chest would occupy if he were breathing, “Get Gaius. Have him bring a stretcher. Avoid being seen and do it quickly.”

* * *

For once, Gaius locks the chamber door.

Between the three of you, you carried Arthur up the long staircase, through the corridors and into the physician’s chamber in its high tower. He kept slipping, even after Gaius tied his chest and feet to the stretcher, and you would see a hand, a lock of hair, and it would feel like a horse’s hoof to the chest.

Once you let go of him, you couldn’t bring yourself to touch him, so Gaius loaded him onto the stretcher with Ygraine’s help. You gathered the loose pages and tucked them into the book. While Gaius unfolded a length of cloth and laid it over Arthur’s body, you took the book to the edge of the dais and hurled it into the chasm. It fell for so long you gave up listening for its arrival. You wanted no part in the book Uther first used to embark upon this path, no memory to sit on Gaius’s shelves and remind of you what you lost and must not get back.

You shut yourself in your room, barricade the door with the dresser. For half an hour, it seems, Gaius bangs on the door, tests the lock and tries a bit of magic to open it. You pull the covers up over your head and top them off with your pillow, except then you have to live with yourself breathing. The blood thrums like Uther’s execution drum in your ears, your wrists, your throat. You sob onto the pillow, onto the damp sheets beneath your head, your whole body shaking with it.

It should have been you, left there in that prison to rot, you on the ground and Arthur with his mother, happy. It wouldn’t have mattered, where you went, if Arthur were there to see the sun rise. It had always been your destiny.

There is a hole in your chest where a heart would fit perfectly, and every breath seems to collapse your lungs farther into it. If you were standing, Arthur would be your spine. Instead, you lie on your bed and stare at the floor, because it is too awful to close your eyes. You tried to move the dresser with magic and it sent a pang through you so violent you had to sit down, so you put your back into it instead.

It does not completely block the door, and through the slats of wood, you can see Gaius’s form, hunched as he sits on the steps right outside.

“I don’t know what to do,” you lament.

“Come out and eat something,” says Gaius.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever eat anything ever again.”

“Merlin, please. It’s not good for you to lock yourself up in there.”

You sniff. “No one will ever want to see me ever again.”

There is a silence so long you think Gaius has gotten up and left, and then Gaius’s careful voice reaches you. “You are not alone in grieving, and soon you will be less alone still. I’ve known Arthur since he was born. But this isn’t my lesson to teach, and you know it. I will not reprimand you.”

“That’s worse,” you mutter, so softly you do not know if it reaches him through the door. “That’s so much worse.”

“You can’t stay in there.”

“Just don’t leave,” you say.

You hear a gentle thump as Gaius settles his back against the door, and then the clinking of utensils. Pressing the pillow tighter against your head, you close your eyes and try to sleep.

When you remove the pillow, late-afternoon gold spills into your room, falls across your eyes. You squint as you sit up, pillow falling to the floor. Your legs are stiff, and your face, damp when you fell asleep, is caked and stiff. You sniffle.

It takes just as much effort to push the dresser away from the door as it did to put it there. You stand with a hand hovering over the door handle, shaking. Your stomach tightens at the thought of Gaius seeing you, Arthur’s blood just as obvious as the tears in the lines of your palms. You do not want to see what he sees when he sees you. The thought brings more tears you cannot blink back, eyes stinging, vision blurry.

The door swings toward you to reveal Gaius asleep against the doorframe, snoring gently. A half-empty plate rests beside his feet, the fork kicked down to the lower landing.

You sit down on the step beneath him and rest your shoulders on his knees. “Gaius,” you say softly. You feel him stir but do not look up at him, hear his sleep-thick voice mumbling. “Gaius,” you say again.

His hand falls on your shoulder, warm but not fevered. He squeezes. His voice is scratchy when he says, “I’ll heat up something to eat.”

You look at your feet, at the abandoned plate. “Don’t bother. I won’t eat it anyway.”

“Nothing in the world could have stopped you, could it?” he says.

“I was so stupid.”

Below you, in the main chamber, Ygraine sits at the table, staring at Arthur. His head is uncovered, one of his hands. Gaius has covered his eyes with sweet-smelling poultice bags. His hair is neat, combed back with fingers. Gaius’s chambers are so pungent that despite the hours that have passed, the room smells of herbs above the lingering scent of those who have passed through with urgent ailments, over the scent of Arthur.

You turn your face to the staircase wall. If neither of you are seeing each other, then she does not exist.

“I should have done better,” you tell Gaius. “I should have refused harder, every time. I should have—I don’t know, exiled myself from Camelot. Then he’d—God, then he’d still be alive. I don’t understand how this could have happened. He was supposed to be my destiny.”

Gaius says nothing, and you are glad.

You say, “He was all our destinies.”

“I know what you were trying to do. I know who you expected to walk back through my door, and I know you would never hurt Arthur. This wasn’t your doing.” His voice is so heavy.

“Then maybe it was magic’s.” It sounds like a snarl, so vitriolic it singes your teeth. “Maybe Uther and everyone was right, maybe no matter how good you are, how good your intentions, maybe magic is just evil. Maybe all it does is take.”

Gaius’s hand lifts from your shoulder and settles in your hair. You stir and tip your head down, and his palm rests on the back of your neck, a father’s touch. “Magic is neither good nor evil,” he says.

“You have no idea what it was like. I felt my soul rush out of my mouth when I said the spell and then he just—he just—” Your voice starts as a snarl and fades to a whimper. You let your head fall back so it rests on Gaius’s knees and close your eyes. “He just fell. He was right there and then he was on the ground looking at me, only it wasn’t him looking at me at all. I don’t know whose those eyes were.”

Maybe they were yours.

In your dream, Arthur is riding a black stallion toward the city of Avalon. The sky is grey like swordmetal; the lake is grey like Gaius’s hair. In your dream, you are on the shore and he is riding toward you, his steed kicking up waves in its wake, unsettling the very ground of Avalon. You are fighting against the wind to stand on the shore and welcome him home. He is riding backwards; he is riding deeper into the lake.

The next time you look at Gaius, he is gone. You search the chamber in a delirious panic, rise to your feet before your vision blacks out and you sway. Gaius is there to catch you, to walk you to a bench beside the table while your vision comes back. He sits beside you and rubs your back, and you don’t have the strength to pull your shoulder back from his.

“Why didn’t it work? Tell me why it didn’t work.”

“I could hazard a guess, but that’s all it would be.”

“Then hazard it.”

Gaius coughs, and you are close enough that you can hear his lips working. “Come to think of it, I’m not so sure it has any merit at all.”

“Then maybe nothing will ever comfort me,” you murmur. He strokes your hair, and you close your eyes. “It will never be okay. I just have to live with this, for the rest of my life. I’m not a great sorcerer. I’m just the one who killed Arthur Pendragon.”

The silence spreads from the two of you like a lit candle, you aware of your breathing and of Gaius’s, your back rising and falling against Gaius’s shoulder. There is no way to say you didn’t kill him, and you both know it.

“Maybe magic isn’t evil,” you tell Gaius. “But I am.”

His voice is heavy, labored. “I know who you wanted to be left there under Camelot. What happened down there was horrible, but you are not evil for it. I do not believe that it was your fault.”

“That’s what you believe.”

* * *

Later, eyes red, Gaius says, “I think—I could be wrong, I’m most likely wrong on all accounts—but it makes sense that the magic needed its caster alive in order to see it through. Arthur was the next available sacrifice.”

You pick at the roll on your plate, the slice of chicken. You say, numbly, “It should have been me. It was supposed to be me.”

You wonder if he wept while you were sleeping, if he is taking a side when he says, “Nobody wants you dead, Merlin, least of all me. Quite frankly, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”

“Don’t be so kind,” you tell him.

He chews his lip. “I’m going to tell Uther tonight.”

You take a bite out of the roll and say, mouth full, “I can’t.” The roll tastes stiff and stale, even though Gaius is careful to keep only fresh food.

“No, in the state you’re in, I think it would be for the best if you stayed here. I’m taking Ygraine, though. I’m worried that the shock of it will kill him.”

The magic swells like waves deep inside you and you know how Uther would see it. You know who he would blame, and you do not blame him. You don’t deserve any better than the block, the stake, the pond you would sink into until you could see Arthur smiling at you from Avalon.

“I killed him,” you say. “That’s the beginning and the end of it. There isn’t another way to look at it. It was my magic. It was me.”

Could you have felt it, you wonder, the moment that the spell took control, the moment it bested your intentions? Could you have called it back, held it in your mouth, banished it? Could you have saved him?

“Uther did the same thing, once, a long time ago,” says Gaius.

“And he blamed Nimueh. Because she was the one who did it. Go ahead and tell him it was me.”

“And I stood by his side when he did so. Do I look like I’ve left his side? I haven’t been charged by your mother with protecting you just to send you to the gallows.” Gaius runs a hand through your hair and stands.

You tear your chicken into shreds while he gathers Ygraine, helps her stand and guides her toward the door.

After they leave, you leave your plate and sit by Arthur’s covered body in the corner of Gaius’s chambers, your legs crossed, the roll forgotten in your hand. Your other hand keeps reaching to pull the sheet down and stopping itself. Eventually, you settle for parting his hair around his brow, smoothing it down.

“You’re really gone,” you whisper.

The blood has begun to pool purple in the back of his neck, his arms, while his face has grown white with its absence. Gaius left the pouches on his eyes, but you know you can remove them, now, without the eyes snapping open. So you do, setting them on the bench behind you without looking. Arthur’s once-full lips are pale, his face cast in shadow from all directions. Every time you try to see him, your eyes fill and you have to wipe them. He looks small, compressed like an empty water skin, like he could deflate if you touched him.

But you touch him, take his cooling hand, close your eyes until the nausea passes, but then you just feel the contours of his hands more clearly.

“There are so many things I never got to say,” you tell him, eyes still closed. “And you wouldn’t want to hear them anyway, because I killed you.”

The silence sounds like the space you would leave for his response.

You imagine what Gaius is telling Uther.

GAIUS: So it seems the son is destined to repeat the sins of the father.

UTHER: [Reaching weakly] My wife.

GAIUS: Are you strong enough to attend the burial, my lord?

UTHER: [Eyes red and wild] Who did this?

GAIUS: [Swallowing] It was Merlin, sire.

In the distance, the bell starts to ring. You are not sure if it is muffled because of your distance, or because you can’t hear anything around the silent body before you. It goes on and on, mournful and rich. Outside you hear footsteps and tense, but you cannot bring yourself to stand.

Someone tries the door handle from the outside and you startle. Hastily, you pull the cloth over Arthur’s face and rub your own. The door opens and Guinevere flies into the room, her face red and raw. She staggers against the edge of the table, skirt caught, and when she yanks it free, her teeth are bared.

“Arthur,” she says. Her eyes ghost over you. You stand abruptly, stumbling backward. For a second, you are on the same plane, Guinevere hurtling toward you, so close you could reach out and stop her. You could reach out and make her see.

And then she is past you, collapsing beside Arthur’s head. She reaches out to caress his face, and even as you back up you can see how erratically her hands are shaking. You have only covered his lips, and Gwen pulls the cloth down, tucks it around his shoulders. Her thumb runs across his pale lips, compresses them beneath her weight. The room is so quiet you can hear her swallow.

“Arthur,” she says again, and hiccups. Her voice is thick and wet.

“Gwen,” you whisper. You are terrified that she might hear, that she might see through you before you have a chance to explain yourself.

“No,” she is sobbing. “You can’t be dead. You can’t.” She does not seem to realize that you are in the room too, and you tiptoe backwards.

She is saying his name as if it will bring him back, and each repetition feels like one of Arthur’s throwing knives penetrating your side, feels like your lungs collapsing like they should have when you whispered the spell. She bends to kiss Arthur, and the sound of their lips parting is the only sound in the room.

You climb the stairs, softly, toward your room.

“Merlin, what happened to him?” she whispers.

You stop and look back at her from the doorframe. Her eyes are red, her face glistening. Her body looks contorted as she turns to you with her dress spread around her knees on the floor. You pretend you cannot hear her over her tears.

You whisper, “I’m sorry.” It is not enough. It will never be enough. There is a distance between you that will never mend.

“Merlin,” she pleads.

“I’m so sorry,” you say, and close the door.

Her eyes through the wood are saying _Why couldn’t you save him?_ All the people you’ve saved and the only one who matters is going cold under Gwen’s lips. How many times has she sat by his side when he was ill, dabbed wet rags on his forehead, whispered words that would call him back?

She should have heard it from you, not Gaius, not the mother Arthur never knew. You pace semicircles around your bed, stepping loudly, hands to your temples to keep them from releasing unwanted magic. You don’t want any of it, anymore.

The sound of her quiet sobs reaches you through the door, and you are pressing your temples, your cheeks, your ears, digging your fingers in but the sound just gets louder.

This is what you imagine will happen:

MERLIN: [Tugging open the door] I killed him.

[Because you cannot stop yourself. Because if your heart was a book you would hurl it into a chasm so deep even Kilgharrah couldn’t recover it. Because you do not want anyone else to break the truth to her.]

[Because you cannot bear anyone else saying _Merlin did this._ ]

GWEN: [Looking up, holding Arthur’s hand] I don’t believe that.

MERLIN: [Suddenly unable to move] I used magic and I killed him, and I don’t want you to think any of this was his fault.

Voices reach you through the antechamber door, Gaius’s and Gwen’s. You rest against the door and peer through its slats, where Gaius is draping a blanket over Gwen’s back. He removes the poultices you placed at the edge of the bench and sits, rubbing Gwen’s back the way, hours ago, he rubbed yours. One of her hands releases Arthur’s to pull the blanket closer around her body.

The wood is cool and rough against your forehead. You scan the room but cannot find where Ygraine is hiding, a small mercy you do not deserve.

Gaius says something and Gwen tilts her head toward him, nods. And it is Gwen who untucks the cloth from around Arthur’s shoulders and pulls it up to cover his head, her movement gentle but sure. Or perhaps you are too far away to see them shaking.

You have no right to share their grief.

This happened once before but you saved her, Morgana. This happened once before and the grief it caused was a thousandfold, but you did not have to see it.

You open the window to draw in the sound of the breeze and are greeted with more noise. Already a crowd is amassing in the courtyard, beneath the citadel walls, speckled with candles like ladybirds. The early evening is alight with lament, with people holding those who they still have to light a fire for the one they don’t.

You sink to the floor. You can still hear Gwen’s voice, but now it is matched by a thousand mourners, and you are so cold inside your jacket.

Camelot used to be yours, but only because it belonged to Arthur.

It takes less than ten minutes to put everything you want to bring with you into your messenger bag, the majority of which time you spend holding your very first spell book, unable to pack it and unable to hurl it away. Over the years, you have filled it with notes of your own, spells of your own devising, corrections on old recipes, and recollections of enemies’ spells. Tears come quicker than you can wipe them away.

_You were magic before you were anything._

You yank the window closed and step through the door.

Gwen and Gaius both look up from the dining table. Gwen is all but smothered in her blanket, her frizzy hair dark against its red, her face raw and blurred with tears. As you watch, she hiccups with her whole body and presses her lips together as if to hold it in. Gaius is pale and washed out on the far side of Gwen from you. His eyes look you up and down.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

Your voice trembles. “I’m leaving. Gwen, I’m sorry. Gaius, I’ve brought you nothing but trouble, and I wish I hadn’t.”

You cross the room slowly, aware of every movement.

“Will Camelot…?” you say.

“I don’t know,” says Gaius, his face open in a way that slices through your lungs. “I don’t know.”

“Merlin,” says Gwen, and she rises from the bench.

You say, “There’s nothing left to say to you.”

Gwen catches your arm, holds your hand tight in one of her own while she reaches up to hold your neck. “Take care of yourself out there.”

“If you’re going to be kind, don’t be kind to me.” Pulling your arm out of hers, you look away.

“I can’t explain myself,” you tell them. “I can’t live in a world without him. I can’t… I can’t watch everyone’s grief. If you’re looking, you’ll know where to find me.”

And you pull the door closed behind you.

* * *

Camelot gives way to Essetir but the trees don’t change. Above you, the same canopy obscuring the sky; inside you, the same heart. You are stumbling by that point, pushing yourself farther than you should each day, making camp after dark falls, sparking fire with your eyes alone. You wake each morning with an empty space in the air beside you, a silence where your name would fit that the wind cannot overtake. Disoriented, you search for horses, for bodies draped under red cloaks, bowls beside the fire to prepare breakfast in. When you don’t find them, you close your eyes and huddle against the early morning chill until something snaps in the undergrowth too close for comfort.

You bite your tongue on all the things you want to tell him, all the goodbyes you had the chance to say and didn’t.

Miles away they are encasing him in marble. Miles behind you, they are laying him in a chamber of the castle you have never had reason to enter, side-by-side with all his ancestors, before even his father.

You find Ealdor in high spirits, midmorning, the fields busy with people and animals. From across the valley, you can see the specks of their bodies moving about, the back-and-forth between the fields and the village proper. After half a day of scrambling through the valley, you slow as you enter the village.

Ever since you left for Camelot, danger has followed every time you’ve returned to Ealdor, so you are not surprised by the suspicion in the eyes of the little boy filling his bucket at the well; the mother teaching her twins to scrub clothes; Geoffrey, the elderly man who helped teach you to read so your mother could get back to work.

It is him that you approach, adjusting your bag over your shoulder.

“Not like you to come alone,” he says, his eyes laughing. “Where’s the entire military might of Camelot?”

“I’m here to stay. Where’s Hunith?” Your voice must be wearier than you realize, because the smile drops off his face.

“In the field. You must be exhausted. Come wait for her at mine; I’m sure I can fix you something to eat.”

Geoffrey leaves the door open, and the laughter of young children enters in peaks and lulls, the patter of their footsteps. Occasionally a donkey trots through the main street, towing its cargo from the fields. You stare out the window while he stokes the fire for hot water for tea, chewing a slice of cheese on bread. You nod when he talks until he stops talking, and then you sit in silence and ignore his glances. This is the first time you have returned without an entourage.

When the sky begins to turn grey and purple, the village comes alive. Its inhabitants come in from all directions, carrying crates or dragging carts, holding tools over their shoulders. You step out into the street to watch, resting your weight on the stake of a low fence so you’ll stay out of the way. You scour every face, meet every smile and nod and wave with one of your own, growing tenser.

You are afraid that she is gone, that Geoffrey is old and wrong and she’s not coming home because she isn’t anywhere, anymore. All you want is for someone to outlive you for a change.

And then you see her, the back of her head, her arms laden with firewood, her coarse dress dusty and dark with sweat. You are running into the street before you realize your feet are moving, dodging the evening bustle.

“Mom,” you call.

She turns, her smile dazzling, and the crowd seems to part. “Merlin.”

You smile so wide you start crying, right there in the middle of the street with the sun low and gold in your eyes. Or maybe it is your mother, golden. Your eyes are heavy and you can barely see her; the fear pushes out of your chest.

“Oh, honey, honey. It’s okay.” Her voice is soft and sweet like a river. She steps toward you but she can’t drop the firewood. “You’re going to be okay. Let’s get you inside.”

Your childhood home no longer feels quite like yours, even though Hunith still keeps the books you stumbled over as a child on the lowest kitchen shelf, beside her collection of herbs. The morning’s dishes are still on the table, your mother’s spare dress draped over the bench beneath a ball of thread. The door to your old bedroom is ajar, and you can see your old bed, stripped.

She puts the firewood beside the hearth while you pull the door closed. You don’t leave the doorway until she comes back, until she stands in the kitchen and examines you with shrewd, careful eyes.

“Oh, Merlin,” she says, and her voice is sad. She reaches up to cup your face, and you close your eyes and lean into it. When you reach out, she steps into the embrace.

You break down in your mother’s arms, your body shaking so hard it is a miracle she is able to hold on. The house fades, the days-long trek through the woods, even your mother fades until all you can see is the dark behind your eyes. You hold her tighter than you’ve ever held anyone, and when she gasps, you cannot hear it for the high, shuddering keening coming out of you. When you breathe, you gasp. Your cheeks are fevered, your body uncontrolled. You can’t open your eyes, but behind your eyelids, a golden-haired figure clad in red. Behind your eyelids the curtains around Arthur’s bed, the way you felt like you were soaring when he laughed. He had smile lines and his eyes turned to crescents when he looked at you and he was never still.

Your mother holds you for a long time.

“I wish I never had magic at all,” you say at last, thick and muffled, into her hair.

“Honey, what happened?”

It is an effort to speak, punctuated by sobs. You forget what you are saying and stumble for words in the dark. “I wish I could rip it off like a scab and throw it somewhere I’d never find it again.”

She nods against your chest. You shudder, but she holds you up, strokes your back and your hair. “Your magic is a gift. Did Camelot—are you in danger?”

“I’m the danger. It was me. Of everything Camelot ever faced, it was me. I’m a danger as long as I’m alive. If I love someone, if I try to do good, I’m a danger.”

Her fingers tighten in your jacket. “Don’t say that. I know who I raised. You’re the kindest man I know.”

You grip her and say nothing for a long time. And then, slowly: “Have you ever done something so horrible it changed the whole world for the worse? So horrible it changed you and everything you know, so unforgivable, so… I don’t know, it’s like the world ended but it didn’t, like I’m the one that ended instead.”

Your legs wobble, but your mother catches you. She shifts, so you open your eyes as she guides you into a kitchen chair. You fall backwards into it, disoriented, the world a blur of brown and beige. Unwilling to let you go for the seconds it would take to drag another chair over, she remains standing, holds your head against her stomach. You wrap your arms around her waist

Her voice is shaky when she says, “You never know where you’ll find forgiveness.”

“If I told you, even you would hate me.”

“My baby,” she says. “You know I wouldn’t.”

Your voice is rougher, and you speak into the cloth of her dress. Though your face is burning, you shiver. “You don’t understand. You’d hate me. I… I couldn’t… there was nothing for me there.

“Whenever you’re ready to tell me, Merlin. If anyone could forgive you, it’s your mother.”

“Don’t make that kind of promise.”

She reaches up to stroke your hair. “I promise.”

* * *

You wake late and your mother lets you. It is not luxury. In the space between sleep and the morning sky you feel Arthur’s leather boot hitting your shoulder, over and over, and wake to nothing but sunlight falling through the glassless window.

You still wake crying, with tears dried on your face, but now your mother wakes too. Sometimes you do not recognize the difficulty breathing until you feel your mother’s hand caressing yours, rubbing circles on your shoulder.

In your dream, Guinevere is sewing patches of Arthur’s clothes haphazardly across your jacket, teardrop splashes of red. She pulls needles out of your teeth, thread from your fingertips. Each time you open your mouth to speak, she places her fingers against your tongue so your words come out heavy and unrefined like river stones, and she cannot understand you.

In the dream, Arthur is pale, his skin bruised. He faces you in the boat, gripping the side as though seasick. There are oars across his lap but he doesn’t use them. This must be what the ocean looks like at dusk, water everywhere and the mist surrounding it. The first time you saw the ocean, at the end of the Labyrinth of Gedref, he gave his life for you. You couldn’t even do the same. The ocean is not an ocean anymore; it is a veil, stretched out beneath you, rippling as the boat glides across its surface.

Arthur reaches for the bottom of the boat, for the golden hilt of Excalibur. When he holds it, you see all the magnificence of the dragons; you see Albion’s millennia in Arthur’s hand. It is pulsing, Excalibur. He touches it to the sky and throws it overboard.

Late mornings or early afternoons, you stumble into the field without brushing your hair and the midday heat makes you nauseous within the hour. There is something you are supposed to be doing here, but you are not sure what it is.

Beyond the door, beyond the windows, the people of your village bring the harvest to a close. They load oxen-drawn carts with Lot’s share of the harvest. You step outside to listen to their talk, to watch older men and women with the village’s toddlers. There have always been elders to watch the children, to keep them from harm. It is a small luxury you know now many villages cannot afford. You have seen such hungry eyes in passing on patrols. You have seen a worry you cannot understand.

You sit beside the greying couple and hold out your arms for a two-year-old toddling into the empty road. She smiles, giggling. If you smile back, you do not feel it. You have never seen any of these children before.

The you of a few months ago would feel the pull of magic, though you have learnt that magic, in many ways, is as practical as the craft of a physician. The old you would twist his fingers into fists to keep it from coming out. You know how to, now, but the old you wouldn’t be able to help it.

The little girl stumbles into your arms. You have done nothing to break this girl’s trust, and it becomes the most important thing in the world that you keep it. You brush off her knees the way your mother used to and turn her around.

For a tiny village, there are so many faces you don’t recognize. Ealdor is busy and it is going on without you.

* * *

One Sunday, your mother sits with you on a ridge above the field, and the two of you look over the sleepy village. The sun over the mountains rises lazily, clear and gold. Your head casts a shadow on your mother’s shoulder, but the open fields are alight, dark soil turned to ochre. This could be everything you need, you think, acres of farmland, houses made of mud and thatch, the yearly cycle of toil. If you could be happy anywhere, it would be here.

You told your mother to wake you before the sun. You have measured the night to avoid dreaming, or at least to avoid remembering your dreams.

This morning, you put on clean clothes and brush your hair down with your fingers. Stubble has grown out on your jaw. In your mother’s small mirror, you see the way it rings your face; you see your washed-out eyes, your gaunt cheeks. You don’t have much reason to look at yourself, now that there is no one to see you besides your mother.

On the ridge, your mother tells you, easily, “It’s been a good year. I’m not going to have to send my son to bed hungry this year.”

There were seasons, years, in your childhood when childless families brought offerings to fill your empty pottage bowl. There were years when the whole village waned and clothes hung off everyone’s shoulders like they did from clotheslines, but this is not one of those years, even if it is a cruel blessing.

“I’ve missed the work,” you admit.

“You’d rather weed the fields than live in a castle?”

“Yes,” you say. “I want nothing to do with that castle, and it wants nothing to do with me. Besides, this is honest, honorable work. It’s nice to do something with my whole body.”

She looks closely at you, and the sun glances off her eyes, makes them silver like the light through the throne room’s stained glass. “Merlin, when are you going to tell me what happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know you don’t. I haven’t said anything because when you’re grieving, you need time.”

The fear that she knows everything, that she has seen it in your eyes and the way you hold your jaw, rushes over you like a runaway horse. “I didn’t mean to,” you say, right there in the sun. Your whole village could be looking up at you, your voice an open plea, and it would not stop you. If you talk, then the fear doesn’t matter.

“It sounds idiotic and pointless and it’s not—it’s not going to make up for a single second I stood there and performed the spell, but it was supposed to be me. We haven’t done all the things we were meant to do. Where did I go wrong?”

When she pulls you close, your body remains stiff. Her voice is cautious and heavy. Here, in Lot’s kingdom, she can say it. “I’m glad it wasn’t you.”

You don’t look at her when you say, plaintive, “I want him back.” For once, you want tears, but your eyes sting and are dry.

“Arthur,” she whispers, and takes your hand in the grass. Without looking, you stretch out your fingers. “Every time you two came through Ealdor, I could see how much he cared about you. How much he respected this place because it was your home. It’s hard to believe you were only a servant.”

“I don’t think I was, in the end. I think—” here you laugh, briefly “—I think he was planning on something along the lines of Court Sorcerer.”

Her smile is thin. “Now, that would be a title befitting of my boy.”

Take a breath, close your eyes. Say, “Do you remember—it was a long time and you might not, but do you remember coming to Camelot one time when you were really sick? It was sudden and Gaius said you could only hold out for a few days. Do you remember? Mother, I did it before. He was dying so I found a sorcerer who could do the spell; I told her I was willing to pay any price, and I meant me, but she took you. It was the greatest gift that I had time to save you, and even then, it wasn’t all me. So no, I didn’t get him killed. I killed him.”

Her fingers dance over yours. “Magic can do that? Bring someone back?”

“Please don’t look at me,” you say, and stare at the sky. Her hand still rests on top of yours. You can feel the weight of her eyes; in the corner of your own, you can see the slope of her cheek. “I only have that power because of something I did when I saved you.” You take a shuddering breath. “It was all me. Nobody else did it for me. It was my hands, my voice, my whole being. It’s something I have to carry with me, forever.

“Mother, there is not a single part of me that isn’t guilty. He wasn’t just my destiny; he was the reason I’m alive. I’m here, and I’m alive, but I don’t know what I am without him.”

Your mother takes your cheek. She holds it without pressure, her hands warm and rough, and you turn to her. “You’re still you. You’re still my boy. I hope some day you can see that.”

* * *

For months you live here. You see the new crop to its harvest and fall into rhythm, but you remain a broken spoke. The wheel judders against the ground. You wake like a drowned man surfacing, lungs and heart burning. You are living here, so you have to live here.

You decide you are done being magic. You decide you are done sitting in your house watching the shadows grow, and you have your mother wake you when she wakes, before the sky has begun to turn grey. In the fields, muscle memory takes over. By the time you wake early enough to work the fields, it is time to sow the fallow field.

You are done being magic, but your blood sings to you. It speaks a language you know more by instinct than by intellect, calls you back from dozing by the fire, pulls you up short in the fields, your hands burning with it. Though you are as careful as you were for nineteen years in the village, you grow restless.

The dark place is waiting if you give in. It is waiting for you to remember Camelot in mourning behind you, Arthur’s body entombed and his successor selected from a host of relatives who will never do half as much good as he could have. Sometimes you see Gwen’s eyes in your mother’s, Gwen in tears the last time you saw her. You want to imagine it is easier for them, but this is bigger than you, bigger than destiny, bigger than anything except for him.

“I want to remember,” you tell your mother one evening. You finish with the dishes while she lights the fire. There is wood in abundance and kindling from the fields. “I want to remember what magic felt like when it felt right, and I can’t do that here.”

You want to say: _It was right when I was Arthur’s, even with his father’s sword over my head. It was right when I knew my destiny._

In the dishwater, you see the soaring shape of Kilgharrah,

“I’d be sad to see you go.” Her voice is soft from the other room, heavy with smoke.

“I know. I owe you a lot – you, Ealdor.” But it feels too much like absence. If you are careful, you will be across the valley before you start crying.

“Wherever you go,” says your mother, “you have my blessing. You’re your own man, and I accepted long ago that your world is bigger than this small village.” Clothes shift as she rises from the fire, her fingers dark from the firestick she props against the wall.

You reach for the rabbit’s foot beside her herbs and turn it over in your palm. Its stiff fur quavers when you run your fingers over it. Its pads are stiff and cracked, emptied of all moisture. You are done being of Camelot. You are done with its walls and its faces, familiar and forgettable, of keeping your tongue tight against the roof of your mouth to hold onto your secret. You are tired of being a secret, of your life being abhorrent on everyone’s tongues.

You are tired of being abhorrent on your own tongue, of your tongue like a traitor in your mouth.

“I want to remember the way it was mine,” you say. Because she cannot see you from the other room, you can say this. “I want to drown in it.”

Your mother says, “It’s been a blessing having you here these past months. I wish the world wasn’t so cruel to those with your gifts.” You can feel her presence beside you, but you don’t look up from the rabbit’s foot. She touches your shoulder with the flat of her hand.

“It was going to be different,” you insist. “When he became king, he was going to change things. He was going to change Albion for the better.”

“I can’t make it easier for you.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m left with one option. I need it to be mine. Whatever I have to do. Get so far away from Camelot that nobody’s afraid of magic. Go across the ocean. I can’t live like this, hiding and hating every part of myself.”

Your mother touches your shoulder, and you close your hand around the charm. “Hopefully you’ll be going with more than just that bag.”

“You know I can’t afford more.” You look at her, all in shadow, her face upturned. Her eyes are darker than anything you’ve ever seen.

She takes your hand and says, “Let me see that.”

You open your palm and she lifts the charm from it, her chin lifted as she studies your face. Her face is orange in the firelight.

“I remember you giving this to me,” she says. “But you need it more than I do. It will keep you safe. Though I’m not sure it will remind you to be careful.”

You laugh with your nose. “You know I can’t promise to be careful. The life of a sorcerer, even outside of Camelot, is a precarious one. I’ll do my best. I just need to know that I can go on.” You hope she knows what you need it to mean, that if you do not face every danger that rises against you then you will never be half the man you used to be.

Her fingers close around yours, soft fur in the center of your palm. The foot has always felt heavier than it looked, as though waterlogged, as though held down by the life it was taken from and the lives it was saving. This is the weight of your mother’s life, you think, and now it is the weight of yours. Your feet ache with it, your bones.

You say, “I want to leave tomorrow, or the day after.”

She says, “If this is what you need to be happy, you can depart in the morning. Get some rest. Who knows when you’ll be able to sleep comfortably next?”

While you pack, she gathers food for your journey. There is not much to take with you—it seems to you now that this place was only temporary, and always was—so you can fit the parcel of food into your one bag. The empty space where your book of spells would have fit seems emptier even as you strain to latch the bag.

You fall asleep listening to your mother’s breathing in the other room, the night sky through the window full of stars, your hands full of fire with nowhere to put it.

In the dream, Arthur is holding your hands while his fingers turn to sand. If he was bone, he could be something you could hold, but the sand turns to water, rising around his feet. But by the time they buried him, you were crossing the border. You try to close your hands around him but you come up empty of a single grain in his cascade.

* * *

The earth calls in morning dew on the crops, in leaves shuddering against each other, in your mother’s rough hands on yours. It is too early to say goodbye in words, so her knuckles tell you.

You hold your mother for minutes and stare at her for longer, eyes darting from feature to feature as if trying to catalogue them. When you pull back, the ghost of her body clings to your jacket. You are sure, in your belly, that this is the last time you will ever see her. Your eyes sting and then her fingers are on your cheek, her nails short and jagged, to wipe tears from your lashes. This administration leaves your cheeks damp and your vision blurry.

You say, voice rough, “Mother, don’t make me want to stay.”

You say, “I need to thank you for everything you’ve done for me here. Thank you for everything.”

“You’ll always be my boy,” she says. “And you’re always welcome back.”

“I know. But if I never see you again, I love you.”

Hoisting your bag, you step into the grey dawn. Already the town has begun to stir; already people turn from beside the well or from their toolsheds to watch your departure. On the distant peaks, the rising sun turns the trees orange. You are aware of the sound your every footfall makes.

You stop once, at the edge of town, where the bushes, the hedges, push over the path, and you take a deep breath. If you look back, you will never be able to leave.

You look back. Your mother stands beside her cottage, waving, one hand rubbing her eyes. She smiles, and you feel your cheeks strain to smile back. If you don’t go now, you might as well die.

You shut your eyes, and like that you turn away.

As you walk, the earth sings to you of the Old Religion, a form of magic you have never let yourself study, compels you to run your palms over tree bark, to bathe your hands in flatland stream. It sings from the sky when you chart your position by the sun, when you set your course into a world you have never beheld, its forests and cliffs alive with animals whose names you could never guess, a sky to see for the very first time.

Beyond it all, somewhere, the sea, and beyond the sea, a vast world that has never heard of Arthur or Camelot or the Pendragons. An unburdened world, you think, and you readjust your bag.

When you set up for the night, Ealdor is still in sight. You can see a mass of thatch and rolling fields, dark shapes toiling along their rows like the spots of ladybirds. You build your fire before the lights come on valley, before the chimneys fill up with smoke and build a beacon to call you home, because you have to collect your own wood. You can light a fire out of nothing but you can’t make nothing burn.

The mountains stretch away behind you like a distant staircase, like if you climbed them you would reach the seat of Arthur’s empty throne. You plan to walk until you can no longer see their peaks, the ground rolling, flat enough that the haze of distance will take the mountains away from you before the sky does.

At nightfall, you summon Kilgharrah, the language pulled out of you like a baby tooth. Though he once told you he could traverse half the world in a second, you wait until your hands grow cold, the sky empty of its stars. A waning crescent glows through the cloud cover. You leave a pile of sticks in a campsite beside a clearing, on the top of a hill from which you cannot see the lights of Ealdor.

By the time he lands, the earth shuddering under his feet, you are crying. Wind from his folding wings rushes through the clearing, tears at the treetops, wakens night birds and bats who flee from the boughs like a blossoming. They cover the stars and send them whirling; they cover your gasps.

“Hello, Emrys,” the dragon purrs.

“You said I had a destiny,” you scream, your voice a violent wind. “You told me Arthur and I were two sides of the same coin, that our destinies were entwined.”

Kilgharrah regards you solemnly, scales radiant beneath the crescent moon. “Very few, even of the Old Religion, had the power to change destiny. You’ve failed to stop it before.”

You stutter over your words, your whole body tight and shaking. “We didn’t get to live ours. It never happened. All those things you talked about never happened.”

Again he pauses, his eyes inscrutable, teeth bared.

“Answer me,” you demand.

Thoughtfully, Kilgharrah says, “Perhaps it is you who is more powerful than destiny. Do you know what _Emrys_ means?”

There is a solemnity here, but you want a procession; you want mourners in black, wailing; you want someone in tears who isn’t you.

You are not sure he hears when you say, “Whatever it means, it’s better than being Merlin.”

“It means _immortal_.”

You pause and find you can’t look him in the eyes. Your voice is raw and plain. “But I’m not. I’m just me. I mean, I grew up. I’m still growing up.”

“The druids sensed it, and I did, too. I knew who you were before you knew what Camelot looked like. When I am rot in the ground, you will still be here, and you will be magnificent.”

“I’m not going to watch everybody die.” You say it like it can keep the horror out. “I’m not going back.”

“You will live, and you will see him again,” says Kilgharrah. Even though his tone hasn’t changed, even though his eyes are intense, the words are kind. He bends down so you can scramble up the length of his wing, so you do.

Your stomach lurches when he takes flight, the sudden vertical ascent, and then you clear the treetops and the wind falls through you like a waterfall.

He climbs higher and higher, and you are careful to breathe. Through the dark, villages light themselves on fire. In the distance, the dazzling light of cities.

You look up at the sky, its abundance of stars. Kilgharrah tears through the clouds and the moon falls on you like riverwater, turns his scales to silver, not like swordmetal but like a cup, gleaming in the half light in the hands of a woman with blue eyes and a torn gown, whose waters you once carried back to Arthur.

Nothing is going to be simple for you again, but for now, you cling to Kilgharrah’s scales as he circles the clouds, as he banks, the world rushing away beneath you. It is so simple to hold this moment, to know that Arthur is coming and you will see him again, to smile into the night air and let it chill your teeth.

Despite it all, you are alive. The world is big and you don’t have to be afraid anymore.


End file.
